WESTBROOK – Talent, as the writer Daniel Coyle argues, tends to be cultivated in clusters. Soccer in Maine is no different, as there is an 838-square mile swath of Maine that produces an outsized amount of soccer talent compared to the rest of the state. To visually appreciate this “Golden Triangle” of soccer talent in Maine, you would place three pins on a map of Maine with the towns of Gorham as the northwest vertex, Cape Elizabeth as the southeast point, and Richmond as the northeast boundary.

The 14 public high schools within this triangular hotbed of soccer talent have won nearly half of all the girls and boys soccer state championships awarded since 1970, even though they represent only about a quarter of the 58 fully public high schools in Maine who fielded girls and boys soccer teams in 2011. And the 21 towns and cities within this epicenter of soccer excellence have produced almost two-thirds of the state’s All-American players and more than half of Maine’s all-New England selections since the awards were first given out in 1989, despite representing only 20 percent of the state’s population. Piggybacking on the thesis of the journalist Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski, co-authors of the 2010 book “Soccernomics”, there are two important reasons for why these 14 high schools and 21 towns and cities represent the Golden Triangle of Maine soccer: game experience and wealth.

The 21 towns and cities that make up the Golden Triangle have a collective median household income that is a little more than one-third greater than Maine as a whole. This indicator of relative affluence is important. First, it reaffirms the conventional wisdom that wealth is a consequential factor in the pay-to-play culture of youth soccer in the U.S. The breeding grounds of the best soccer talent in Maine have increasingly shifted over the last decade from the more affordable town-based travel teams to the considerably more expensive regional premier soccer clubs. Instead of paying fees in the low hundreds of dollars to get the best soccer-playing opportunities in the state, most of the better players in the state are now paying thousands of dollars per year for the opportunity to play with and against the best competition this state has to offer. This is a compelling reason for why these towns are ahead of the rest of the state in developing soccer talent and will probably continue to be in the future. However, the relative affluence of these communities also provides historical context for why their programs were dominant even before premier soccer clubs became as influential as they are today.

Franklin Foer observes in his book “How Soccer Explains the World” that soccer has been the sport of choice among America’s more affluent populations since participation rates in youth soccer exploded in the 1970s. That observation dovetails nicely with the fact that all 14 high schools within the Golden Triangle christened a boys soccer program in the 1970s, the decade in which soccer established its foothold in Maine’s high school sporting scene. And each of these schools created a girls soccer program when the first wave of girls programs were established throughout the 1980s. Therefore, each of these schools have had decades to not only develop the high school’s soccer programs and play the hundreds of games (including high-quality playoff competitions) that Kuper and Szymanski argue are so important, but also decades to cultivate mature feeder programs and networks in the youth ranks. This historical context might actually be more consequential than wealth itself. Recognizing that the plural of anecdote is not data, it is nevertheless useful to consider the case of the Poland Regional High School Knights. Despite the school’s relative wealth, the Knights’ soccer teams weren’t established until 1999, making them relative newcomers to the scene. In the years since, the Knights’ girls and boys teams have combined to win only 20 percent of their games. It should come as no surprise that the school’s geographic locations does not fall within the Golden Triangle.

John Morgan was the Westbrook High School boys soccer coach this past fall.