Letdown, or U.S. soccer wakeup call?

After 240 minutes on a soccer field this week watching some of the best of the best compete in postseason play, it’s safe to say the game is in good shape in these parts.

As far as the rest of the United States, we’re still trying to catch up.

WITH STATE tournaments starting next week in the Boise area, area schools around here have been busy trying to book their tickets.

Two teams — the Post Falls boys and Lake City girls — have done just that in the 5A tournament. The Coeur d’Alene boys and Post Falls girls will try to join them a little later today.

Just a year ago, the Viking boys fought through to the championship match before losing to Boise. Coeur d’Alene returned most of its roster from that team this year, so the Vikings know just how to get this next job done.

Lake City’s girls won a state title in a shootout last year, and while a few pieces have since moved on, the Timberwolves, too, know just what is in front of them next week.

Timberlake’s boys will try to advance to the state 3A tournament for the first time in a short four-year program history today.

A lot of the programs around here talk about having tradition, and it’s apparent with the number of kids moving onto the Division I level in recent years.

Consider that Post Falls product Timmy Mueller (Oregon State) and Lake City products Havana Johnson (McNeese State), Meghan Bare (Idaho State) and Tiegan Horton (Portland State) have won state titles for their respective high schools before moving on to the next level.

And these programs will continue to produce talented players, because well, that’s what they’re known for.

IT MIGHT have felt like a disappointment to some that the United States men’s soccer team lost on Tuesday, and combined with a sequence of other events, found itself eliminated from the World Cup in 2018.

It’s bad, but maybe soccer is a sport that we’re trying to catch up with the rest of the world in.

As it seems now, we’ve got things pretty well secure in basketball, wrestling and baseball, but soccer just isn’t something we are good at. Women’s soccer is a different story.

And that’s fine by me. We don’t have to be the best in everything all the time, do we?

Losing never feels good, but maybe something good will come out of this.

Maybe we’ll find the next soccer superstar and he’ll find a way to make us relevant again with the rest of the world.

A softball coach used to tell his team that “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson.”

Hopefully in the U.S. men’s case, this is just a small hurdle before something better happens.

If our local kids can figure it out, they should be able to do that shortly.

Jason Elliott is a sports writer for the Coeur d’Alene Press. He can be reached by telephone at (208) 664-8176, Ext. 2020 or via email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @JECdAPress.