Tag: "Grassroots"

Maryland is not in Germany | Delta settles on new World Cup slogan, ‘A time to make enemies’

Decatur, Georgia | “We only travel to come back home,” writes Ludwig Harig, the German master of the football sonnet. These words have never seemed more true following an aborted trip to Deutschland, a trip that ended in tears on Jun 27 on a sweltering curbside outside the Delta Air Lines terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Obviously the disappointment is acute, all the more so as one of the missions of the Global Game since 2003 has been to connect to the wider world.

Jul 06, 2006 | 0 comments View Post

Is soccer evil? | Quest for playing space threatens bucolic haven

Saratoga, California | In a drama played out daily at planning and zoning hearings throughout the United States, parents’ desires for soccer space in this bedroom community of redwood trees and sycamores have created tension with other residents’ wishes for peace and quiet. The San Jose Mercury News reports on the dispute over the future of [...]

May 30, 2006 | 1 comment View Post

Malays in football | Criticize if you like, but they’re still ‘MyTeam’

Kuala Lumpur | The fantasy of discovering previously unknown talent—the fuel behind American Idol and a host of schlocky televised talent shows worldwide—has been adapted in Malaysia to football. Producers of MyTeam (short for Malay Team), a planned 12-part production on TV3 Malaysia, believe that their idea of fielding a side of amateur footballers drawn from Malaysia’s 13 states will help reinvigorate a moribund domestic game. They hope that the ragtag outfit, following a seven-week training camp, will show well and perhaps defeat the national team on 28 May.

Mar 30, 2006 | 1 comment View Post

The vital home leg | Freetown players find support for game efforts

Freetown, Sierra Leone | The physical prowess of amputee footballers shows clearly in the pictures and text supplied by Robyn Dixon in last Friday’s Los Angeles Times. The victims of atrocities or other injuries incurred during a 10-year civil war, members of the Single Leg Amputee Sports Club must shed prostheses before taking the field and confront the handicap as well as the prejudices of the able-bodied.

Mar 28, 2006 | 0 comments View Post

Holding pattern | Immigrants in Spanish enclave turn to fútbol

Melilla, Spain | For a taste of the familiar after months-long journeys by land and sea, football has much to offer hundreds of displaced Africans. Recently the CETI Club de Fútbol started to compete in a 10-team city league in this Spanish enclave on the coast of northern Morocco.

Mar 19, 2006 | 0 comments View Post

Lens on life | Mathare Valley football offers entrée to squatters’ struggle

Nairobi | Photographer John Barrett Reed traveled in 2005 to the Mathare Valley slums on the eastern edge of Kenya’s capital, hoping to provide new images of Africa for Western audiences who may have become desensitized. He concentrates his lens and writing on a slice of Mathare, home to 600,000 squatters, and uncovers the organic quality of football as [...]

Mar 04, 2006 | 0 comments View Post

Folk football | Lenten rite when pancakes aren’t enough

Ashbourne, England | Brendan Harwood, born south of the River Henmore in this Derbyshire town, goaled a ceremonial, cork-filled ball for the Down’ards at 2130 GMT today to complete a Shrovetide Tuesday football match that some believe has been contested annually for more than 1,000 years. A second match with the Up’ards takes place tomorrow, Ash [...]

Feb 28, 2006 | 0 comments View Post

Kings of carnival | South Florida–based Brazilians make sacred time for futebol

Miami | Eyes turn toward Brazil when considering links between football and the pre-Lenten season. Rio and São Paulo clubs exist symbiotically with samba schools that parade to the sambadrome during the Rio Carnaval. Yet a recent article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel makes even clearer, from talking with expatriate Brazilians in Miami, the strong [...]

Feb 28, 2006 | 0 comments View Post

Thanks for heroes | Jordanian melds many into one

Decatur, Georgia | In the first in a series of Thanksgiving-timed editorials on immigrant leaders in the Atlanta area—titled “New American Heroes”—the Atlanta Journal-Constitution profiles Jordanian Luma Mufleh (see 6 April). Through soccer and the creation of a refugee-staffed cleaning service, Mufleh, 30, has helped give new arrivals to Atlanta a sense of belonging as well as [...]

Nov 25, 2005 | 0 comments View Post

Middle-class USA | Scarsdale lawyers guard touchline from ‘outsiders’

Scarsdale, New York | A Westchester County supplement of the New York Times reports on a growing reality as playing space for soccer becomes scarce: communities having to police their fields to restrict access to “outsiders.” The case discussed by Marek Fuchs in his column (“ ’Go Out and Play’ Has Gotten Complicated,” Nov 20) involves the [...]

Nov 21, 2005 | 0 comments View Post

Buffer zone | Latina women leave home to follow the bouncing ball

New York | Acting on intrigue developed from watching brothers, fathers and husbands play football to their exclusion, women from Honduras and Mexico have overcome initial resistance and formed a local Latina league that now includes more than 200 players with roots from across Latin America, reports Elena Cabral for National Public Radio. The suggestion is [...]

Nov 21, 2005 | 0 comments View Post

Bargaining chips | D.C.’s Barry says soccer ‘makes sense’

Washington | D.C. Council member and former mayor Marion Barry has reversed position on a proposed new stadium for D.C. United to be located in Poplar Point, in the district Barry represents in Anacostia. Realizing that the stadium could represent a $1 billion investment windfall for the primarily low-income area and provide much-needed low-wage housing, Barry [...]

Nov 21, 2005 | 0 comments View Post

Life lessons | Dribbling between cones to understand HIV

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic | WBUR of Boston’s Only a Game lingers with Grassroot Soccer as it employs sport to educate children on sugar-cane plantations in the country’s southwest about HIV/AIDS. Although baseball dominates the domestic sporting scene, reporter Michael Cavanaugh points out that more than 1 million Haitians live in the country and predominate in the [...]

Nov 18, 2005 | 0 comments View Post

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