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Sports

MB Soccer Coach in Chad

Mark Hodson of MB Sand and Surf Soccer Club joins three others in choosing refugees to represent Darfur and play in a June soccer tournament.

Four Americans, including a Manhattan Beach resident, are in eastern Chad today on a mission to recruit players for a soccer team that would represent Darfur in a tournament involving squads composed of refugees from 12 countries.

Mark Hodson of Manhattan Beach, Gabriel Stauring of Hermosa Beach, James Thatcher of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Brian Cleveland of Seymour, Conn., are at Camp Djabel in Eastern Chad heading a so-called U.S. Expedition Team  on behalf of the grassroots organization i-ACT, according to a statement from the group.

Their mission is to select 20 refugee soccer players for what will become Darfur United, which will participate in the 2012 Viva World Cup Soccer Tournament scheduled to be held from June 5-9 in Iraqi Kurdistan, with refugee soccer teams from 12 countries vying for the Nelson Mandela Trophy.

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"Refugees living in the camps we are visiting have lost everything, and even hope is starting to fade," said i-ACT founder and director Stauring. "The Darfur United soccer team will give the people in the camps something of their own to be proud of, to root for."

The American recruiters were at Camp Djabel today on a tour taking them to all 12 Darfuri refugee camps in eastern Chad.

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"We are using Darfur United to tell the story of Darfur and its people and build relationships that will provide support for a population that has lived on the margins, isolated and ignored," Stauring said.

The team's coach is Hodson, who works for a soccer development group called Evolution Soccer and serves as director of coaching at Manhattan Beach Sand and Surf Soccer Club.

During tryouts, five soccer players will be selected from each of the 12 camps in eastern Chad housing refugees from Sudan's war-ravaged Darfur region. Of the 60 selected in round one, the field will be narrowed to 20, of whom 15 will be put on the team roster while five others remain in reserve as alternates.

Thatcher, a graphics and arts media specialist from New York, is serving as the journey's documenting videographer. The effort is to be turned into a film to be directed by Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Paul Freedman.

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