"The Group of Death"

Like I said in my previous post, the Nairobi City Stars U19 team is playing in a Kenyan Premier League Tournament that has a lot of hype and opportunities for potential scouting and recruitment. Today was the first day and our ESPN equivalent, SuperSport, is following the tournament pretty heavily and will probably televise a few games.

Our team is in what is known as the "group of death" in the World Cup. It's called that because for four teams that are favored to do will in the tournament get the unlucky draw to play each other when on paper, they should only see each other in the semi finals or finals, but such is the sport. So today, we played one of the favored teams to win the tournament who also happen to be the oldest team, Tusker FC. They are the oldest team because Tusker is a beer company and they have a policy that the club can't sign any player under 18. The tournament actually had to change the age limit because it was originally a U18 tournament, but Tusker wouldn't have been able to field a team, so they changed it just for them.

So they were the favored and guess what! We won! It was so awesome! The fans were actually yelling "Shitani Ashinwe" which translates into something like "defeat the devil." So after we won, there were like 40 fans that came onto the pitch and were hugging the team and us coaches. There were a lot of Premier League officials at the game and afterwards they couldn't stop talking to the technical bench. They kept telling us how we are the City's team and that there are more boys like the ones we have that we can recruit and develop.

Seeing their excitement and just being so proud of how they played was such a high. Well that's what has been happening today. We have one more game in the group stage because one team dropped out, so if we win on Wednesday then we move onto the quarters.

Please be praying for me this week because after tomorrow night I will be staying with the team at their camp. I have some meetings tomorrow that I need to take care of and then after that I can spend all week and hopefully next week with them. This is an amazing opportunity to disciple, encourage, and begin to mentor some of these boys. So be praying that I can be bold, ask hard questions, and be able to connect with these boys. That connecting part has been so hard these last three months and I really pray that this will be a great way for us to connect. Anyways, love you all and appreciate those of you who keep up with me and want to hear about my life. Cheers.