'Futbol' brings together Pittsfield teens, poor youths in Haiti.

AuthorSmith, Jenn
PositionNews

Byline: Jenn Smith

PITTSFIELD -- For nearly all their lives a group of six friends and city youth soccer players have had the privilege of playing on a proper soccer pitch, with formal uniforms and shoes, in professionally regulated matches.

In April, the teens will be transported to a place where they won't know the language, where the rules of engagement are ever-changing and where the playing field is anything but level.

Haiti is a nation of the barest of resources, but rich and deep is the passion and cultural spirit for the sport they call ''futbol.''

''Here you're so used to so much structure and organization to the game,'' said Pittsfield High School sophomore Jackson Rich. ''But there, they don't have the resources or the equipment or anything. They have to make do. But when they're out there playing, they're loving every minute of it.''

Rich, who traveled to Haiti last January, enlisted his friends to join him on the journey back there during the spring school recess. They'll be volunteer coaches through the Housatonic-based nonprofit, HotFutbol -- ''Hot'' being an acronym for ''health, opportunity and training.''

Joining Rich on the trip led by HotFutbol President John Evans will be PHS juniors Jamie McMahon and Jamie Rosiello, PHS senior Angela Petretta and St. Joseph Central High School juniors Nico Terpak and Michael Peplowski.

Founded in 2007, HotFutbol is formerly known as Konbit Football Ayiti -- ''konbit'' meaning togetherness. Its mission has been to use soccer as a vehicle to improve the quality of life for kids and coaches in Haitian communities.

KFA was in fact the brainchild of a then 16-year-old Pittsfield native, Nick Whalen, who found support in building the organization through Evans, a soccer coach who also works as a psychologist for Berkshire Country Day School.

In 2009, the organization changed its name to HotFutbol. Evans and his wife, Elena, are the helm, steering the program along with a board and a hired an eight-member Haitian coaching staff supported by volunteers.

The work of HotFutbol is done in a continuing urban zone of the capital city of Port-au-Prince known as Delmas 33. HotFutbol works with a grass-roots committee there, leasing a field in Park Izmery, an iconic part of the Haitian political landscape in its own right.

Named after the brothers Antoine and George Izmery, wealthy merchants who were in the 1990s, during the rule of a bloody de facto military dictatorship, brutally assassinated for...

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