Word: soccers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sprawling residential suburb of Huilongguan, northwest of downtown Beijing, the neighborhood soccer league is in the middle of its championship game. The audience, most of them the wives and children of the players, shout encouragement as two teams of men of all ages and sizes dressed in bright yellow and red run across the grass pitch on a college campus. Wang Yuyu, a 32-year-old former amateur athlete, cheers as the Tornadoes beat Meteor Garden 3-1. Wang has only missed a few matches in the past six years, and more than anything, he wants to see the league...
...Chairman Wang, as some of the league members jokingly call him, runs the Huilongguan Super League, China's most influential grassroots soccer league. Huilongguan's members first met each other in 2002 through a classified ad posted on the suburb's community website. "We thought we'd have a kick around, but over 70 people showed up," Wang chuckles. The weekend kick around soon turned into eleven-a-side, and by 2004, nine teams and about 180 players competed in Huilongguan Super League's first championship. (See pictures of street basketball in China...
...constraints of this place with kids ... I think it lessens it, because there are things that I have to do. There's a soccer game on - there's soccer on Saturdays. And we went in Chicago. We go to all their games - or I do, at least. So that makes you get out and be normal. There's parent-teacher conference, there's the play, there's the concert, there's the birthday party. You want to meet the person who's going to ... your kid is going to sleep over with. They want friends over, so you're arranging...
...find the other parents are giving you a little ... like can you sit in your lawn chair at the soccer game and not be ... The more I go, the more I can, right? The more often - and I found this even in Chicago during the campaign. People eventually get used to you, no matter who you are. If I went out there once in a while, I think there would be a ton of excitement because everybody feels like, Well, this is the opportunity. But if people know I'm out there every Saturday, what you get is more...
...meetings with her staff and never any meetings before the girls go to school. She tells aides which days she wants to be "on"; she can concentrate all her public events into a couple of days a week, leaving her free to sit in a lawn chair at the soccer field watching the girls play. Then there are the parent-teacher conferences, the play, the birthday party, the calls with parents to discuss the sleepover. "Kids force you into a normalcy," she says, "that, you know, it even trumps this [place] in some ways...