US Youth soccer organizer and founder Julius Roth passed away April 28, leaving behind a legacy of development in women’s and youth soccer programs across the Midwest.
Roth originally began to help expand youth soccer throughout the United States when he organized the US Youth Soccer State Associations throughout the Midwest, and pushed the U.S. Soccer Federation to allow women’s teams the opportunity to play regularly scheduled games.
He attended the first US Youth Soccer meeting in 1972, at a time when the association had only 80,000 registered youth players—that number had jumped to over 3 million in 2014, according to US Youth Soccer’s website.