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soccer to its full personal and community development potential.

Soccer is the simplest team sport in the world. All you need is a ball, a playing surface, and a goal. Score more goals than the opposition and you win the game. In most of the world even a ball of tape on a patch of dirt and kicking the ball between two objects works.

This is not a game where so much equipment is needed that it restricts participants; not by age, size, race, creed, color or socioeconomic status. It is said that anyone can play soccer at anytime, anywhere.

Soccer is a passion for most Latino kids growing up in urban communities. By saying passion, we don't mean it is just something they like to do. For many Latino families, 'futbol' is like a religion. They follow their favorite teams from home countries; the kids play it, the men play it, the entire family goes to all the games (and often practices too!), games are played most days of the week, but especially Saturday and Sunday, and games are played in every imaginable open space.

Sports in general, and soccer specifically, can be a powerful tool to bring the Hispanic and African-American communities together in these urban areas. With professional black soccer players like Cobi Jones, DeMarcus Beasley, Eddie Pope, and Oguchi "Ooch" Onyewu (who all played in the US and internationally as well) soccer among African-Americans is on the rise.

If we can connect with kids and families in their own context, we have a very powerful opportunity to build relationship and point them to Jesus.

United States in the only country in the world where soccer is a suburban sport. Everywhere else soccer/football/futbol is played, accessibility is not an issue. From the dirt fields of South America to the plains of Kenya, to the slums of Liverpool where the game was founded, the poor of society are "footballers."

Here in America the sport of soccer caught on more in the suburbs than it did in the inner-city. This was caused by a variety of factors, but one factor has kept it a suburban sport; economics.

So what does this mean? It means kids in urban communities (even kids that have been playing soccer for years) are essentially locked out of the US Soccer system because they can't afford to play club soccer. It is simply not accessible to them. The few that are scholarship or sponsored then have to play in an American middle to upper middle class structure that's like entering a totally different world for them. Often these situations don't work out and

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