1st-year team hits stride
Jose E. Garcia
The Arizona Republic
Jun. 17, 2005 12:00 AM
There's a
youth soccer club traveling from the Valley to Denver today in search of
another unexpected championship.
The Tuzos 91, a team of 18 players whose average age is 14, is the first
all-Latino Arizona Youth Soccer Association club to win a state championship.
The Tuzos remarkably accomplished the feat as a first-year program.
Winning the title allowed the Tuzos to represent Arizona in the Far West
Regional, which starts Monday in Denver. The club's talent isn't the only
reason why it's succeeding.
Jesse Cadena, who owns a cleaning and painting company, started the club with
the help of some Hispanic companies, Food City, Bimbo Bakeries USA and El
Mexicano, to help low-income families and their kids play organized soccer.
"It was very difficult," Cadena said, "but not impossible to
start the club."
The Tuzos started kicking last year, but the club was conceived in 2002.
That's when Cadena and Food City started Copa Food City, which is now the
biggest club soccer tournament in the Valley. That tournament led to the
Futbolito Bimbo Soccer League, where the Tuzos and about 2,000 kids play.
Cadena approached the professional Club Tuzos, which also runs one of Mexico's
more successful youth programs, for help. The club agreed to supply Cadena's
club with inexpensive uniforms and scholarships for its best players to train
in Mexico.
Once Cadena's club became one of the professional Tuzos' 17 foreign clubs,
Cadena asked Food City and Bimbo to help pay the AYSA's fees and insurance for
FBSL's kids.
With the backing in place, the local Tuzos club was born last year. The Tuzos'
coaches are volunteers, unlike some of the professionally paid coaches at other
clubs in the Valley.
Despite the lack of professional training, the Tuzos 14-under team became one
of the more successful of FBSL's 110 teams. When the 14-under team won a Las
Vegas tournament in January, the Tuzos became a legitimate state title
contender.
The 14-under team won the state title game recently, but the West Valley club
it beat 2-1 protested the game, Cadena said. The West Valley team said that the
Tuzos played with undocumented immigrants and overage kids, Cadena said.
When Cadena provided the AYSA with his team's birth certificates, the protest
was dropped.
"I was proud of the way our team and the AYSA handled the situation,"
Cadena said.
Before Cadena took care of the off-the-field problems, the Tuzos' talented
forwards, Eduardo Ramirez and Miguel Mendez, took care of business on the
field, scoring goals in bunches.
Ramirez and sweeper Victor Valentin were rewarded for their seasons with
scholarships to train in Mexico this summer with Club Tuzos.
"I believe other teams don't communicate like we do," Valentin said.
"That's why we win."
Valentin and his team had to run a lot of carwashes to come up for the money to
travel to Denver for the weeklong regional tournament.
The team couldn't afford to travel via plane, so the team rented a shuttle to
make the trek to Denver. The travel plans are one of the many obstacles the
club ran into in its first season.
"Nothing is impossible," Cadena said. "I think we proved
that."