By Ari Baral-
ICJA plans on offering soccer for male students starting next fall.
Until now, soccer was only offered to girls at Ida Crown. After numerous emails back and forth between Noah Brody, Noam Braun, and Rabbi Matanky, with additional efforts by Chuck Moscovitch, the new director of athletics Coach Peter was put in touch with Noah Brody, to offer solutions with scheduling and coaching. After Noah Brody and Moshe Lodkin went around signing people up for soccer, the administration finally greenlighted a boys’ soccer team.
When asked about boys’ soccer status as a team, Noah responded: “…We will not be on the IHSA Illinois high school association, the entity that makes rules for all high school athletics. We will still be a team playing against other high schools with practices like any other school team … the first year [will be] a trial run. The hope is after that we will join the IHSA league.”
Noah explained that not being part of IHSA means the team cannot participate in the tournament, which is held on Shabbat anyways.
While most of the student body seems to be on board with the new all boys soccer team, some cross country members are worried about their own sport losing players.
“Cross country is going to be awful next year” said Gavriel Engel, a cross country member. Gavriel voiced the common concern that cross country runners would defect from cross country to play soccer.
Gabe Burstyn, a sophomore, had a similar fear: “If there are kids to play, then I think [soccer] is a really good idea. But it definitely will take away from the cross country team, which has perhaps been the most dominant team Ida Crown has.”
Gabe also pointed out a possible problem for ICJA’s competitive standard, that a new soccer team may create: “Starting a soccer team will pull a lot of the higher level talent from the Cross Country team … [it will be] a negative for the school’s competitive level as a whole.”
Gabe did seem optimistic about a soccer team diversifying ICJA’s sports and giving students even more sports options to pick from.
Ethan Comrov, a Cross Country varsity runner, was more hopeful that members of the Cross Country team would use a new soccer club as an opportunity to try out a new sport and test their skills. He was also worried about Cross Country losing skilled players: “It’s going to be very tough, especially for head coach Ezra Jaffe who [will be losing] varsity runners who are very athletic, very fast, who may join the soccer team.”
Ethan was uncertain about joining the soccer team, but was confident that a new team could have many benefits, such as attracting more prospective students to ICJA and offering male students yet another sport.
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