While soccer and football remain lights apart at the professional level — MLS would settle for 1 percent of the NFL’s $2.2 billion annual TV revenues — the two sports are on a collision course at the high school level. In a sweeping examination of the decline in the phenomenon of Friday night high school football, titled “Unintentional Grounding,” Sports Illustrated notes that interest in high school football has declined in 37 of 50 states in the 1990s. It presents a case study of four schools — two where football was dropped and two where interest has waned. The addition of high school soccer, under pressure from kids graduating from youth leagues, was probably the direct cause of Hinsdale (N.Y.) Central dropping football this fall. Changing demographics — i.e., the influx of soccer-mad Latinos — are an important reason for the decline in football attendance at football power Coral Gables outside Miami. Notes Gables AD Harold Cole, “If we pushed soccer and played it at night, I think soccer would outdraw football.” For all soccer’s strides, it has yet to be woven into the fabric of communities like high school football has been for decades. A case can be made that soccer will never made it at the national level as a spectator sport if it doesn’t grow as a spectator sport at the local level. Football’s decline presents as opportunity for soccer, though one wonders how many school administrators will indeed push soccer. Soccer will face the same competition that has impacted high school football: the heavy expansion in the NBA and NHL, extension of baseball playoffs, advent of cable, introduction of computer games and move into cyperspace. Resistance will be strong. As the coach of one of Hinsdale’s former rivals commented to SI, “You can’t rally around a soccer team.”