A New Era for Baltimore Kickers Adult Soccer

The Baltimore Kickers voted to invite a new group of adult footballers to represent the club at the meeting held on February 3rd, 2013. My team, formerly known as Mundo Football Club, was excited to accept the invitation. My players and I feel that this a great honor and a perfect match for our team. We are very proud to represent the longest running amateur soccer team in Maryland and to become part of an organization that has such deep roots in the Baltimore community.

We have been playing together as a team since 2003. I created Mundo FC to participate in the now-defunct Baltimore Metro League which played Tuesdays and Thursdays during the summer. I’d been playing pick-up soccer at various locations around Baltimore and met a lot of players without a regular team. I’d recently moved to Baltimore and thought it was amazing how diverse the pick-up games were. I was meeting players from all over the world. Our current roster includes players born in America, Germany, Cameroon, Nigeria, Iran, El Salvador, Egypt, Trinidad, and Jamaica. At various moments in our history we’ve also had players from Romania, Mexico, Mali, France, Spain, Brazil, Kenya, and Zambia.

Every season and every year, as we sign on new players, we have improved and grown as a team. We now have an unlimited Sunday team and an over 30 Wednesday night team. We started in division III and now both teams compete in the top division of their respective leagues. This means that the Baltimore Kicker name will now be represented by a group of committed players who practice and play together year round. In the offseason, we hold practices and participate in tournaments. We have worked long and hard to improve the team and we hope that in the next few years we can bring many championships and trophies home to the Kickers clubhouse.

We are more than just a soccer team, however; the team itself is truly its own community. Many of us have been playing together for over 8 years. When one of us is injured, the others chip in to help with medical costs. Players connect with each other outside of soccer—for example, a lawyer on the team might help a team-mate with a contract or a professor at Hopkins might help another player with his graduate school applications. Some of us send our kids to the same daycare center and we often celebrate birthdays and holidays together. We look forward to bringing the commitment and energy we show to our team-mates to the Kickers organization as a whole.

This commitment to community and making connections can be seen in the early contact we’ve established between soccer director Larry Luis’ Baltimore Kickers under-11 team and the new adult Kickers squad. In the two weeks since we became the Kickers, we’ve  had a chance to watch the youth team play (and win) a futsal match at the Park School and we’ve had adult players participate and help out at a couple of Larry’s practices with his kids at White Oak Elementary on Tuesday and Thursday night. In addition, Larry himself came to watch one of our Stewart State Cup games in Silver Spring.

We look forward to building on this throughout the year and participating in many Baltimore Kickers activities, both soccer and non-soccer related. We are thinking about ways we can bring the youth and adult teams together for some fun (and photographs) and looking ahead at club-wide events. We’ll keep the organization as a whole informed about our games and results and I’m sure things will evolve and progress over the course of our first year as we all get to know each other.

Thanks for welcoming us to become part of your club and we look forward to meeting more of you throughout 2013.