Our players know a great deal about this soccer club and almost nothing about the town it plays in.
They arrive every spring from across the United States and from the other side of the world, and they come for one reason: high-level soccer, in a place where a lot of people would not expect to find it. Most of them could tell you our league position. Very few of them had been to a town square.
So we took them to three.
At the first one - Spanish Spring Town Square - the curiosity ran both ways. Our players wanted to see what The Villages was actually like. The residents wanted to know about the team. Neither group needed much encouragement, and it made for a good start to the evening.
The weather had opinions about the journey to the second. As we were heading to Sumter Landing Town Square the sky closed and the rain poured. So, we decided to keep going south.
At the third - Brownwood Paddock Square, we got lucky. DJ Scooter was playing.
Anybody who has spent five minutes in this community knows Scooter, and knows what happens to a square when he is on. Our players found out.
They joined the residents on the dance floor and stayed there.
Song after song, a group of twenty-year-olds from half a dozen countries dancing beside people three and four times their age, with nothing asked of anybody except that they enjoy themselves. The young and the young at heart, and no daylight between them.
Then the clouds came back.
They danced one more song anyway — out in it, in the rain, with people cheering them on — and left with the sort of grins you cannot manufacture.
They are back on the training field this week with a bit more swagger and a lot more appreciation for the place they chose to spend their summer.
Thank you to everybody in those squares who made them feel like they belonged here. That is exactly what this club wanted the evening to be.
Come and see them play.
