During a match in Kansas City, Missouri, Algerian soccer fans show their appreciation for city of Lawrence, Kansas, where Algeria’s National Team practiced. (© Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images)
The dozens of international soccer teams that visited the United States this summer found more than just competition. U.S. cities that served as training camps for visiting teams rolled out the red carpet for the world’s best players and their traveling fans.
Algeria’s National Team chose Lawrence, Kansas, for its base camp — the place it would live and train before and during the tournament — because of the college town’s outstanding facilities and proximity to Kansas City, where the team played two of its matches. As team members rolled into town, they heard their country’s national anthem thanks to Sharon Toulouse, director of athletic bands at the University of Kansas. She had recruited members of the university’s Marching Jayhawks band to rehearse the anthem and play it upon the Algerian team’s arrival.
Toulouse, who served in the U.S. military, tracked down a copy of the sheet music from the U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own.” Students wore Algerian scarves while playing the anthem for the Algerian players, and fans of the team who had come to watch practice sang along.
“Any time I hear our national anthem, it means so much. I know it meant so much to them,” Toulouse said. “Our town just accepted them as their own.”
Restaurants in Lawrence offered mint tea, an Algerian staple. And a local tourism bureau, eXplore Lawrence, hosted watch parties for Algeria’s matches. Ruth DeWitt, director of community relations at eXplore Lawrence, and her husband hosted a fan of the Algerian team who visited from Minnesota.
Meanwhile, Algeria’s fans showed their gratitude with a banner displayed at one of the team’s matches. “It was a magical connection,” DeWitt says, adding that Lawrence is now looking to form a sister city relationship with a town in Algeria to continue the connection. “The joy and love between these communities has been valuable beyond any price tag.”
Some of the outpouring of hospitality came from fans with connections to visiting teams. Ferdane Bekmezci, of Bellevue, Washington, was so “jazzed up” when she learned her native Belgium’s national team would train near her adopted Seattle-area hometown that she organized a watch party and march to the stadium on match day.
Fans of Team Belgium flocked together wearing matching face paint, jerseys and hats, she says, because soccer “is in the backbone of people” in Belgium. Bekmezci says she was also happy to see soccer gaining popularity in the United States, where she is now a citizen, and that before watching the two teams square off, she believed she would win either way.
In anticipation of the Croatia National Team’s arrival, staff at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, spent months growing, mowing, rolling and perfecting its Bermuda grass field. Dan O’Neil, the school’s director of auxiliary programs, says grounds crew head Glenn Sweet took the lead in readying the field. “If there was daylight, he was on it.”
The school provided golf carts to shuttle players between the weight room and the pitch and opened its basketball gym for players to unwind after practice.
When hundreds of local kids came to watch practice, “the team seemed to have fun with it — signing autographs and kicking balls into the crowd,” O’Neil says. Croatian players also gifted the school a national team jersey that will go on display.
