A pick-up game along the N1 highway in Accra.

This is why the United States will never be a power in international soccer.

In the Ghana I saw, makeshift fields seemed to be all over the place. If not, decent if uninviting fields abounded. They were at every school, it seemed, even if they're just a big open space of packed dirt with some goals at either end.

On a visit to the botanical gardens at Arburi, I saw a co-ed group of middle-school-aged kids on a field trip spend much of their lunch break playing a pick-up game on a grassy field.

American towns, by contrast, have baseball fields, but how often do you see kids out on them in pick-up games? I'm sure it happens -- I did it some when I was a kid - but not like this. I also don't doubt that there are kids all over the United States kicking soccer balls around with one another. But more often, kids are playing only on organized teams or under coaching, either from a parent or club-team coach or some other adult.

In Ghana, as I suspect in most of the world, there's little competition from other sports. You play football if you play team sports. Sure, there's running, some basketball, maybe boxing. Ghana recently had its first Olympic swimmer. But to many, it seems to me, "sports" means football, ie, soccer.

But I think there's more at play here. For one thing, there's a different mindset to parenting. Kids are left more to their own devices. Few parents and grandparents seem to think it's their job to keep kids busy all the time.

In my three-plus-weeks sample, I did see a few organized games, including with uniforms and coaches. But mostly it was kids on their own, developing ball control or defensive skills, passing, field tactics, communication -- the whole array of what it takes to play the sport. Sure, they might not get the sophisticated early coaching American gets get, but they replace that with simply playing more and figuring it out on their own. When they do get good coaching, they already know the game pretty well and can advance more quickly. They stick with it because they want to, and aren't diverted by adults who, in America at least, too often discourage kids who don't show promise early on. Ghanaian kids can stick with it through pure desire. You can be a late bloomer, because nobody's watching.