Avon Park Field Is Soccer Hotspot

AVON PARK - Club Toluca and Cruz Azul are well-known soccer teams in Mexico, and they have been formidable teams on Memorial Field as well.

The players, many of them immigrants and migrants, converge every Sunday through the winter and the spring to play soccer in the Aztec League, which just began its sixth season.

And they don't take their pastime lightly, either. The games have a referee and two assistants flagging each sideline.

One can hear an occasional angry scream from the coaches on the sidelines when a call goes against their team, when they're not trying to rally their players during the game. Teams take players living in Wauchula, Lake Placid, Frostproof and beyond the Heartland, with visiting teams occasionally coming from Arcadia and Bradenton.

The uniforms even match up with the colors of their namesake teams in Mexico, at least for those based on them.

Where do they get the uniforms from?

"Any Mexican store," answered Marino Gomez, a referee and the league's organizer. He advertises the league in those same stores all over the county to draw most of the players forming the nine teams that make up the league.

A lot of the players have played "football" in other leagues before coming to Florida.

Ras Dappa, who was playing as the goalkeeper for the Jamaican Lions Sunday, said he has rotated through all the positions over the five years he played in the Aztec League. When he immigrated to Avon Park from Jamaica, he joked, "the second day, this is where I'm at" as he gestured to the field.

"I asked my wife where the soccer fields are at."

Marcos Garcia, a forward with Aztec League's Toluca team, is one of the new players. A fan of the Mexico City-based Cruz Azul, he said he and his Mexican-born brothers followed them as the Aztec League began, when his two brothers joined. Though he was playing with a separate Catholic church group in Lake Placid, he said he followed his brothers after several of his friends also joined.

"Most of the guys on my team are from Mexico," Garcia said. He happened to be in the minority, a native of El Paso and a long-time Avon Park resident.

From One Field

The players come and go, usually in large numbers, and Gomez expected this turnover. Because many of the players are migrant workers, Gomez said entire teams would come and go each season. He even happens to schedule the soccer season with the orange crop growing season so that it lines up with the migrants' schedules.

"Sometimes, migrants move," he said. "They go somewhere else to work. Different people come and know about the league."

Gomez said it has been like this all six years of the league's existence. Between the crowds and the popularity of the league, he had considered expanding it within Avon Park, but he said he only has this field. And the players knew it was a very rough one at that.

Gomez said he was hoping to get a second field eventually, either from the city or from the county so that the Aztec League could host more than 10 teams. That, and he was pushing for improvements on the existing field.

For Dappa and his fellow players, this was their field.

"We got nowhere else to go," Dappa said.