Football, Faith, Future

Football, Faith, Future is the slogan for Hope Academy, the academy that I am working on structuring here in Kenya. Like I said in my last post, I needed that vacation time to rest, process, and think about everything that I had learned, seen, and observed the last three months. Actually today is my three month anniversary of being in Kenya as well as my 11 month anniversary with Olivia Leigh Perry! Crazy how the two coincide together.

So this weekend has been spent writing what the organization was, where we are now, and where we want to be in the future. Apart from all of this writing, I had the opportunity to be the head coach for Petra Boys for the second time and we won our first game! I made a lot more subs that I did the first game, but I actually felt like I was able to "get into the game" and figure out what was lacking and make the needed adjustments, and it worked! HA! On top of that, NCS played their sixth match and we're also looking for their first win of the season. They were playing Gor Mahia, which has the largest following out of all the team's and played infront of 13,000 plus fans. I had already counted it as a loss for us, but what do you know! We surprised everyone in the league and had the biggest upset of the season thus far. Some of their fans actually told our fans that they thought the reason that they had yet to beat us in 3 years is because they use witch craft before the games. Interesting they came up with that.

This week the KPL is having their first ever U-19 tournament. It's structured just like the World Cup. It's a two week tournament where housing, food, and transportation are provided. This week I'll be staying at my apartment, but I might stay next week if we get out of the group stages. This morning, we had a ceremony where the officials drew the teams for the brackets and luckily we were drawn for the group known as the "group of death." It'll definitely be a hard week for us, but a sweet one.

Well please keep me in your prayers this week as I coach, mentor and spend a lot of time with these young boys. Baraka and until next time, badi!