Huckaby: Sorry, ladies, soccer is not football here

In most of the world they call it football -- which is quite reasonable, since there is so much emphasis on the participants' feet. If you want to actually touch the ball with your hand you have to wear a gaudy long-sleeved jersey that's nothing like the ones your teammates sport.

Here in the American South only football is called football. To us, what the elite female athletes of the world are playing this month is soccer -- albeit soccer on a big stage.

Having been confined to my home for much of the summer, I have attempted to get interested in the Women's World Cup championship. Honesty compels me to admit that I am fighting a losing battle.

I do have a history with women's football, understand. Remember the 1996 Olympics? I brought my son, Jackson, to Athens to watch the semifinal matches between where the hedges had been. He was excited about seeing Mia Hamm. I was just hoping Brandi Chastain would score the winning goal. You never knew how that precious child might celebrate.

And we had a wonderful time. Hamm was incredible, Chastain behaved and a tall, sandy-haired player named Michelle Akers was the star of the show.

That wasn't my first soccer game.

The first soccer game I ever saw -- I coached. It was 1982 at Clarkston High School. In a former life I was a high school girls' basketball coach.

DeKalb County was a hotbed for youth soccer, but Clarkston had no girls' team and the parents were on Principal Dewey Holbrook's head to add one. He approached me in the hall one day and said, "Huckaby, we've got to start a girls' soccer team and since you already coach girls' basketball, you need to coach it."

I said, "Mr. Holbrook, I've never even seen a soccer game." I was telling the truth, too.

He said, "The season is six weeks long and it pays $2,