Don't feel bad if you don't know who won soccer's World Cup

We’ve officially hit that time of year when there’s not a whole lot happening on the local sports scene.

Youth baseball and basketball has finished up for another year and most folks are looking forward to the start of another football season.

Outside of Conecuh County and Alabama, much of the rest of the world has been going gaa-gaa over the FIFA World Cup, which is arguably the biggest sporting event in the world. In the finals on Sunday, Germany beat Argentina, 1-0, in Rio de Janeiro to win the world tile. If you didn’t know that, don’t feel bad. I had to Google it myself.

One thing about the World Cup that caught my eye during the past week was Wednesday of last week’s “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” cartoon, which carried an item about the Prison World Cup. This athletic event is for soccer playing inmates of different nationalities that’s played every four years at the Klong Prem Prison in Thailand.

According to a 2009 article in TIME magazine, this enormous, maximum security prison holds so many inmates from foreign countries that the prison staff is able to fill 10 teams, representing the United States, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Nigeria and Thailand.

During the Prison World Cup, they don’t play by ordinary soccer rules. Instead of the matches consisting of the usual two 45-minute halves, the prison matches consist of just two 20-minute halves. Also, instead of playing on a full-sized field, which in soccer is called the “pitch,” the prison matches are held on a field about half the size of a regulation soccer field.

Even stranger, the winners of the Prison World Cup are even given a replica of the real World Cup trophy. However, their trophy is made of wood and is made in the prison workshop.

I’ve often wondered how high school soccer would work in Conecuh County. When I worked in Mississippi a number of years ago, the large public high school there had a very competitive girls soccer team that was somewhat entertaining to watch. Maybe the best thing about it, it gave the girls who didn’t want to play softball another athletic option in the spring.

If memory serves me correctly, the school there fielded a soccer team to help balance out the number of varsity sports available to both boys and girls at the school. Maybe the best thing about it all was that it opened the door for potential soccer athletic scholarships at colleges that fielded women’s soccer teams. Those were opportunities that some of the girls wouldn’t have had if it hadn’t been for the school having a soccer team.

With that said, we’ve got just 43 more days to wait until the start of the high school football (not futbol) season, that is, just a little over seven weeks until Hillcrest High School opens at Monroe County High School in Monroeville and Sparta Academy opens at Southern Academy in Greensboro. Both of those games will be played on Aug. 29.