Cleats bring color to area fields

Say goodbye to the traditional black or white soccer cleat and hello to some rather eye-catching colors.

In what appears to be the latest trend in soccer footwear, players are choosing to don cleats in bright, vivid colors and stowing their more conventional cleat in the back of the closet.

The trend came to Aiken this weekend. Flashes of neon yellow, green, blue and even purple shone on every field Saturday and Sunday in the Aiken Soccer Cup.

"It happened after the World Cup," said Kathleen Smith, the mother of a FSA Florence Fury player. "That's totally where it came from. Before you had to be the best player on the team to wear shoes like that. Have you seen the lilac ones?"

"The catalogs are all about the shoe colors," said Tamara Sloan.

Sloan's son, Bobby, wore his orange shoes to the Aiken Soccer Cup. He has a blue pair to match his blue Florence Fury uniform, but they're brand new, and he didn't want to get blisters this weekend.

One month before the 2010 FIFA World Cup kicked off in South Africa, Nike unveiled its new Elite Series football boots. The new series, which included the popular Mercurial Vapor SuperFly II, deliver lightweight performance, Nike said, and their contrasting colors of metallic purple and orange improved on-field visibility.

"For a footballer, this unique combination is designed to increase visual performance, enabling them to quickly spot their teammates and execute a game-changing pass. An average person's vision is 99 percent peripheral. Under 1 percent is considered foveal, or focused vision. To spark increased focus of peripheral vision, Nike designers analyzed the color spectrum to identify two high-contrast colors, so that when a player is running with these boots, the colors trigger a stimulus to rapidly tune peripheral vision," Nike reported according to press materials.

Other brands like PUMA, Adidas and Umbro have jumped onto the brightly colored bandwagon, too.

Sydney Belt, 11, went to a Dick's Sporting Goods store to find a pair of neon yellow soccer cleats.

"Yellow is my favorite color," she said.

"If they were not at Dick's, we were going somewhere else," said Sydney's mother, Joelle Belt.

Josh Mackie looked for a pair of cleats online before shopping at Academy Sports. He sported a yellow pair Sunday. He said he first saw players wearing them not in the World Cup, but in the FIFA Confederations Cup.

"People say, 'They match your ball," because I have a yellow soccer ball," Mackie said.

Sh'nia Gordon outfitted her cotton candy-blue shoes with hot pink shoelaces because the cleats' spikes are hot pink.

"Yeah, people say my shoes look like cotton candy," she said.