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Do You Want To Play Football For Jim Harbaugh? You Better Play Soccer First

By: Evan Jankens
@kingofthekc

Have you ever dreamed of playing at the University of Michigan for Jim Harbaugh?

Just playing football while growing up won't cut it anymore. Harbaugh suggests playing soccer till you're in the eighth grade will help out your football career.

According to the Wall Street Journal (pay site):

"There is really no other game like it," Harbaugh said last month after Michigan practiced with the Italian Serie A club AS Roma . "I always encourage youngsters in America to play soccer."

Of course he does. Harbaugh is the counterintuitive outlier in a sport that breeds conservative thinkers. In that way his unlikely embrace of soccer is perfectly Harbaughian. It's something that seems preposterous until you think more about it, at which point it makes so much sense that you start to question why it took so long for others to figure out.

Harbaugh goes on to say, "I think every American boy should play soccer till the eighth grade, then they should play football. American football."

He tells the kids he recruits that soccer helps them with footwork, coordination, balance, conditioning and spatial awareness.

Even at Harbaugh's QB camp, recruit Andrew Van Wie said that Harbaugh brought out soccer balls before their lunch break. The coach would have the young men spend 30 minutes playing soccer.

Harbaugh admits he didn't come up with the idea to evaluate football players in other sports. He took it from the legendary coach Bill Walsh, who told Harbaugh that he used to look for "the best athlete in the entire high school."

There are many activities other than football that reveal athletic instincts, Harbaugh says. You can play soccer. You can navigate an inflated labyrinth. "You can climb a tree!" he said last year. "That's about as good of an athletic rep you can get."

I am a notorious Michigan hater but I completely agree with Harbaugh, kids should play more than one sport growing up and I also believe it adds to the competitiveness within a person.

The moral to the story is if you want to be the next Jake Rudock or Andrew Luck with Jim Harbaugh, go outside and start kicking around that soccer ball.

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