Are you ready for some Futbol?

Along with owning most major businesses in Honduras, our students' families also own the professional sports teams here, and by professional sports teams of course I mean soccer teams since that is the only sport which most people here are passionate about. What they lack in variety of sports teams they make up for in fanaticism for their soccer. The best team in the country over the last few years has been the San Pedro Sula-based team named Marathon (yes it means the same thing in Spanish and no it's not sponsored by the gas stations). It so happens that our middle school president made a campaign promise that if she won the election, she'd bring the Marathon team to school to play a game against the middle schoolers and to sign autographs. While this sounds like a crazy campaign promise, in reality it was made much easier by the fact that her uncle owns the team. Last Thursday she followed through on the promise and here are a few photos to prove it.

Marathon warming up.

Our middle schoolers warming up.

Header off of a corner kick.

The kids have never been this interested in class!

The game was played on the soccer field just down the hill from the middle school which you see in the upper left of the picture. Not a bad setting to play a little futbol!

The Marathon team bus has a T-Rex on it since that's apparently the team's mascot... kind of cool.

Another action shot... stop that shot Portero!

The girls got a shot to play against the team after the boys were done.

Many of the girls were even more excited after the game to get the autograph of this guy who they apparently thought was "dreamy".