After a slow start, the high school girls futbol team won the ACCAS Tournament in Calí, March 16-19, beating Colegio Nueva Granada 1-0 in the final. 

The team finished the tournament with 4 wins, 1 tie and 1 match lost. They scored a total of 13 goals with only 3 against. Captain Juliana Mira, Grade 12, led the team with 4 goals. 

“I knew that I had a team that was backing me up and many people knew the team wasn’t as steady as it used to be, but I knew that I had girls that I could count with,” Mira said.

After the pandemic, starting to train again after such a pause was a big challenge both for girls and for the coach. Girls Head Soccer Coach Chapo Arango began a new chapter that had its ups and downs but he never lost faith in his team. 

“Before going to the ACCAS tournament I felt insecure, mistrustful and frustrated but I knew that if I achieved teamwork we could get good results,” Arango said.

There were not as many girls signed up this year to complete the team, so they were forced to invite two 8th graders, Candelaria Fernandez and Susana Jaramillo. Both players played in multiple games and Arango scored one goal.

“During the tournament, in the first match, I wasn’t very happy but still I did not lose my faith. But at the end, it was clear how we managed to work as a team,” Coach Arango said.

This is the 30th anniversary of the ACCAS tournament, which draws schools from all over Colombia. This year’s tournament featured teams from seven schools and has a strong focus on good sportsmanship.

“Right now there are 16 ACCAS schools and because of the pandemic we could not have a tournament with 16 schools in a single campus, so what we decided to do was have the central section have a tournament,” Freddie Badillo, TCS Athletic Director, said.

The ACCAS was very different compared to the 2019 tournament, they were able to have more teams invited, while this year the teams were divided to play in different towns because of the pandemic and the tournament was split up into regions El eje cafetero and La costa. 

“It is highly unlikely to have one school host 16 teams for all 6 sports categories, no school has the facilities to be able to host a tournament like that,” Badillo said.

Coach Arango understood the difficulties in their path, after the team started to recover from the pandemic, he had come to terms with accepting if they won a title or not, his goal was to unite a team. 

“The most important thing for me was not the title, it was achieving the goal of getting a team, a family,” Coach Arango said.