Before the tournament started, the players and parents painted the stands
On the first night of the soccer tournament here in La Mesa, Colombia, I got a little taste of the quality of the teams my sons would be playing against. While we were waiting in the central plaza for the inaugural parade and opening ceremonies, I asked the U13 coach for Compensar in Bogotá about his soccer school’s program.
“We practice two hours every day, Monday through Friday,” he said. “If they boys fail to progress, they are let go from the team.”
“So it’s similar to the Ajax program in Holland?” I asked, referring to one of the most notoriously Spartan but successful youth programs in the world.
“Yes,” he said, nodding at the normal-looking 12-year-olds sitting on the benches next to him. “We are always working toward developing professional soccer players.”
The differences between a typical U.S. soccer tournament and this Colombian soccer festival in La Mesa, which is a town of about 30,000 residents about two hours south and west of Bogotá, continued from there. Because there are only three nearby fields in this mountainous Andean town, the game schedule started at 6 a.m. and continued until 11:30 p.m. Since we lived here in 2007 and 2008, my sons were invited to come back for the tournament and return to the teams they had played on two years ago.
The schedule for the next day was posted every evening at the stadium, and it was incumbent upon the coaches – usually called teachers here in Colombia – to find out when their team played and get their team to the field. But if they didn’t quite manage it, arriving an hour or two late for example, the faux pas was forgiven and the game was rescheduled.
Another difference was that the tournament was not cancelled. Torrents of rain began falling on Tuesday, the first day of the tournament, and it continued throughout the week. The fields were “unplayable” by U.S. standards, but the soccer, or some facsimile of the game, continued. My older son’s Under-15 team played Ubaté, another Bogotá-area town team, at 11:30 p.m. under the not-so-bright stadium lights, in pouring rain and huge mud puddles. The La Mesa team ran and played their hearts out in the first half, going up 2 to 0. Ubaté regrouped during the half time and took advantage of La Mesa’s exhaustion, scoring two quick goals to tie the game. By about 12:30 a.m., both teams were severely fatigued from running in the deep mud and standing water. Gabriel, my older son, won the ball in Ubaté’s end and switched the field, where a La Mesa forward — surprisingly unmarked — managed to dig the ball out of mud inside the 18-yard box and shoot, getting the team a goal and a much-needed win.
Unfortunately but not surprisingly, La Mesa could not get such a good result when my younger son’s team played Compensar, the Bogotá club that is “always working toward developing professional soccer players.” The future professionals were also hampered by the terrible field conditions, but they managed to score three goals against the La Mesa Under-13s. The La Mesa goalkeeper walked off the field, huge tears mixing with the mud on his face. His teammates tried to console him, although they were also disappointed with their performance. “The mud and puddles hurt them more than they hurt us,” my younger son, Mario, said.
