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Even with an Olympics-berth deciding game on their hands, the players of Canada’s national women’s soccer team sneaked in time to give back to their community.
They dropped by to watch and encourage players from the Homeless World Cup team Thursday morning during their training at Andy Livingston Park.
Paula Armstrong, a player on the women’s street soccer team, said it meant a lot to them to meet the players from Team Canada.
“It’s out of this world,” she said. “It’s beyond anything I could’ve imagined coming from the Downtown Eastside and being involved with drugs and poverty.”
Omar Duran, who dropped in to play with his friends on the street soccer team, said the unexpected visitors distracted him from the morning scrimmage.
“They were all very friendly and nice,” he said. “They’re telling us they were nervous for (the game against Mexico), and excited as well.”
“I had my heart divided because I’m Canadian and Mexican,” Duran added. “I told them that and they were like, ‘You have to decide if you’re going to cheer for Canada or Mexico.’ In the end, they won my heart and I’m going to cheer for Canada.”
North Delta’s Chelsea Buckland, a forward for the national team, said the team is in a positive mindset and pumped up to play on Friday.
“There’s definitely the pressure of playing against a great Mexico squad,” she said. “Their fan base is going to be up to par with our Canadian fans.”
“This is do-or-die,” Buckland added. “We’re going to put everything on the line because this is it. This game is the determination if we go to the Olympics or not.”
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Dr. Alan Bates knows the satisfaction, and fun, of mentoring old and young.
For almost four years he’s been coaching soccer teams composed mostly of Vancouver street people, which has led to rewarding trips to both Rio de Janeiro and Paris for the Home-less World Cup.
Now in the psychiatric residency program at the University of B.C., Bates has transformed his love of soccer into helping provide role models for inner-city men, women, boys and girls, many of whom are waiting for someone to believe in them.
Through Vancouver Street Soccer, scores of inner-city residents, ranging from ages 15 to 54, get the chance to be on teams with players from all walks of life, some of whom end up serving as their mentors.
Playing sports together, Bates said, mentors and mentees, some of whom are dealing with drug problems, get a chance to experience “positive peer pres-sure” from their teammates, which lures them to work hard, pay attention and practise sportsmanship.
“If you got hammered the night before on drugs or alcohol, you’re not going to do well for your team the next morning,” said Bates, 34, who works closely with Portland FC. It’s a soccer squad connected to the Downtown Eastside’s Portland Hotel, which is a leader in innovative social engagement.
Members of Vancouver’s homeless soccer teams will play against a very different backdrop for their next few matches: the Eiffel Tower.
Soccer players from British Columbia make up the bulk of Canada’s men’s and women’s teams competing at the Homeless World Cup in Paris this weekend.
As 23-year-old Hector Valle preparing Tuesday for a 5 a.m. flight to Paris, said he feels like “a little kid” again.
“I just can’t wait,” he said. “I think tonight’s one of the longest nights that I’ve ever had.”
Like many of the B.C. team members representing Canada, it’s Valle’s first time at a world championship, and first time in Paris.
Sixty-four teams representing 48 countries will gather at the iconic Champ de Mars for the weeklong tournament, where players take the skills they’ve learned in street soccer games to the big leagues. The event is courtesy of local fundraising and corporate sponsorship.
Kurt Heinrich, an organizer for Vancouver’s Portland FC team on which many of the members play, said it’s inspiring to watch the players grow through sport.
“One of the neatest things we’ve seen is this transformation in many of the players who competed in Rio de Janeiro last year, who have now taken on leadership roles,” he said.
Canada’s team took home that tournament’s Fair Play Award.
Heinrich said the players, all of whom have been recently affected by homelessness, find community in the team, which helps foster friendship and allows players to reclaim skills they thought they’d lost.
“The one thing I like the most is our friendship,” Valle said. “We support each other in all the ways possible; we have become like a family to each other.”
Eight women and five men from B.C., along with four men from Ontario, will represent Canada’s entire contingent at the tournament.
Reality didn’t start to set in for 20-year-old Erin Backer until yesterday, she said. By this morning, she’ll be on a plane to Paris, representing Canada in the Homeless World Cup.
She’ll be joining five men and eight women from B.C. to compete with 64 other national teams vying in the annual soccer tournament.
Everyone who plays in the competition have experienced homelessness in the last two years, are homeless or at risk of homelessness.
A year and a half ago, Backer was living on the streets. Drugs had put her there. Drugs and, as she put it, “a kerfuffle of different stuff.” Kerfuffle, Backer said with a wry smile, is one of her favourite words.
“The last time I used my drug of choice was May 3, 2010.” Six days later, Backer turned toCovenant House in Vancouver to help her fight her addiction. “I haven’t used since,” she said.
Backer’s team, Portland Phoenix, is one of a number of teams that plays in the Lower Mainland and across the country in the Street Soccer Canada league.
A lot of soccer players in Vancouver come from shelters managed by the Portland Hotel Society– the society is also the biggest sponsor and supporter, said Kurt Heinrich, Portland FC’s communications manager. Along with other fundraising events, including the popular Rocker for Street Soccer, which raised over $10,000 for the team this year, the non-profit Portland Hotel Society provides most of the money for players to go to the world cup.
A group of British Columbians is headed to Paris to represent Canada at the Homeless World Cup of Soccer.
Virgil Goosehead is among the 13 players — eight women and five men from around B.C. — headed to the tournament.
He started playing soccer one year ago, and says it has changed his life.
“It’s changed a lot,” he said. “I’ve got my son now. I quit drinking and I quit doing hard drugs. I’ve straightened my life around. I’ve finished school, I’ve graduated. I’m happy about that.”
Erin Backer was recovering from drug and alcohol addition when she saw a poster for the Vancouver Street Soccer League.
She joined up and hasn’t stopped playing since.
“Through that I started going to these workshops and then I got into a job training program and then I got a work experience then I got a job,” she said.
“Now I have my own place and I’m working full time so it could have been something else, but it was soccer.”
Backer said she is excited to represent Canada, and looking forward to meeting other people to share stories with.
The B.C. players will arrive in Toronto Wednesday to meet up with some players from Ontario before heading off to Paris for the big game, which starts on Sunday.
When she saw nothing but black flesh and the raw, exposed tendon where her middle finger should have been, Paula Armstrong reached her breaking point.
The blond, one-time high school track star and long jump record-setter from Winnipeg, was as good as dead, she told herself. Crack was the culprit.
“That was it for me,” Armstrong said last week, 12 days before she joins the first Canadian women’s team to travel to the Homeless World Cup and play soccer in Paris, France. “I looked at myself in the mirror, I said, ‘Paula, you’ve lost your finger to this drug, you’ve lost your teeth to this drug. What’s next? Nothing’s next but death.’”
Death wasn’t for Armstrong, who now takes pride and even glee in recounting the story of her amputated finger, this time as recently as last weekend for her teammates and coaches after practice with the Vancouver Street Soccer League.
They’re grotesque and riveting, the details of her rotting flesh and the decay that nearly took her entire right hand. Also engaging is the story of her affluent, white-collar criminal ex-husband. When he went to jail, she headed west.
More engrossing than the gore or the gossip, however, is Armstrong herself. A vigorous hand-talker, who wears a white bandana to keep fine hair and sweat off her forehead during a Sunday soccer scrimmage at Strathcona Park, her eyes are rimmed with a flirtatious smudge of mascara and no rouge can recreate the natural flush on her cheeks. She’s as alive as she once feared dead.
Read more: http://www.vancourier.com/news/Kicking+habits/5246152/story.html#ixzz1V1OLOF5t
The power of sport was on display at Oppenheimer Park Wednesday.
Just ask Erin Backer.
In the past nine months, she’s gone from living in a shelter to accessing drug treatment, cleaning up her life and having a place of her own to call home.
She’ll also be representing Canada when Vancouver’s homeless soccer teams compete in the FIFA Homeless World Cup in France next week.
It’s been a monumental turn-around for someone who just saw a recruitment poster for the team and decided to give it a try.
“Huge change,” nodded the 20-year-old after a practice session yesterday. “At that point in my life, I had just lost touch with everything. [Soccer] is one of the first things that got me out of the house after treatment. Now I’m going to Paris, it’s such an honour.”
In preparation for the World Cup, the men and women on the homeless teams were paid a visit by Vancouver Whitecaps Jeb Brovsky, Shea Salinas, Bilal Duckett and Jonathan Leathers yesterday for a kick around.
“I’m really touched that these guys took time out of their day and do this,” Backer said after the scrimmage. “They’re a bunch of great guys too, super nice, passionate about soccer and just willing to kick the ball around for the bit.”
It was an experience the professionals enjoyed as much as the amateurs.
“They’re having a lot of fun, which is the most important thing. For us, it becomes a job sometimes, so this reminds us why we play the game in the beginning,” Salinas said. “It’s awesome that these guys have used the sport to their advantage and change their lives.”
The Vancouver-based teams, Portland FC and Portland Phoenix, representing Canada leave for the Homeless World Cup next Wednesday morning.
Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside isn’t exactly Empire Field or BC Place.
But four Vancouver Whitecaps players scrimmaged there Wednesday with Vancouver Street Soccer League players, several of whom are headed for the 2011 Homeless World Cup in Paris later this month.
“We drive by this way every day on the way to Empire so we see these people all the time,” said Caps’ midfielder Jeb Brovsky, who helped organize the scrimmage.
“To be on the same field with them is as inspiring to us as it is for them.”
The VSSL uses soccer to empower and inspire the homeless, the addicted and others deemed at risk.
Patrick Oleman, who captained the Canadian men’s team that competed in the 2010 Homeless World Cup in Brazil, enjoyed playing with Brovsky, Whitecaps midfielder Shea Salinas and defenders Bilal Duckett and Jonathan Leathers. He even got to show them his scorpion kick, made famous by Colombian goalkeeper Rene Higuita, who stopped a shot by diving forward and kicking the ball away with the bottom of his feet.
Oleman, 33, quit taking drugs a month before he joined a soccer team about two years ago.
“Your body hurts when you quit drugs and soccer gave me something to do to keep the brain occupied,” he said.
“I try to play every day.” Brovsky hopes the Whitecaps can formalize a relationship with the men’s and women’s homeless teams.
“With a Homeless World Cup every year, this is something that the Whitecaps and the city in general should jump on,” he said.
“It’s so great to see the lives that are being changed by this amazing sport.”
VSSL president Alan Bates said the Whitecaps have collaborated informally with homeless teams in recent years by donating equipment and inviting players to games.
“Our players are so excited about the prospect of getting to meet some of the Whitecaps or watching games,” he said.
“They see them as kind of an inspiration and I hope our players are an inspiration for the Whitecaps, too.”
Three Vancouver men and five Vancouver women will be on the Canadian teams participating in this year’s Homeless World Cup to be held in Paris from Aug. 21 to Aug. 28.
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/Scrimmaging+with+homeless+squad+players+inspiring+Brovsky/5239707/story.html#ixzz1UmPD7vfK
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