SHE'LL GET SOME CONDITIONING BENEFITS. I tease my European friends and acquaintances by describing soccer as a game that is popular with eight year old girls in the States, and adult males everywhere else. Apparently the popularity of the game even overcomes skepticism in the Banaian household.

Littlest Scholar took up soccer this year. I am not a big fan of the professional game, and am even less of a fan of youth soccer. The sight of thirty-somethings shouting "Go Jenny!!!!!!!" to their seven year old in a glob with eighteen other seven-year-olds suggests to me nothing short of the end of civilization-as-we-know-it. And for her first ten years on the planet Littlest agreed, and we referred to the kids on the field as "the herds" the fields near our house that from three blocks away can be heard during the height of summer with soccer parents shouting as "the herd prarire."

But this spring LS announced she would like to try the game after all, and so we went. While her interests have changed mine have not, and despite seeing my own child dart and weave around the field -- at least at this age the herd-like behavior sort of disappears -- I confess to being utterly bored with the games.

Perhaps so, but the muscular development of soccer players is aesthetically pleasing, almost as much so as the muscular development of dinghy sailors.

Alas, youth soccer Minnesota style includes overweening cigar-phobia, with probably hidden tendencies to favor metric measurements and European tax rates.