Lawrence Welcomes Algeria With 5 to 6 Hundred Fans — Is Algeria Soccer Team Good
is algeria soccer team good? In Lawrence, Kansas, the answer was on display outside the team hotel. Algeria’s arrival at the DoubleTree drew five to six hundred fans the first evening, then hundreds and later thousands more at public gatherings across the city.
Valdimir Petković at the DoubleTree
Valdimir Petković said the first scene hit him immediately. “Seeing five to six hundred people that first evening, fans that were waiting outside our hotel, it really gave me goosebumps,” the Algeria head coach said ahead of Tuesday’s showdown with Argentina.
Lawrence is a college town of about 100,000 in northeastern Kansas, and Algeria chose the Lawrence DoubleTree as its base camp hotel. The city sits a little over 40 miles from Kansas City, where Argentina, the Netherlands and England also set up World Cup base camps, but Lawrence still drew the kind of response no one seemed to expect.
L’Algerie fi Kansas City
That response did not happen by accident. Local organizers commissioned artwork, put signs on lampposts that read 1,2,3, Viva l’Algérie!, and even McDonald’s drive-thru windows in Lawrence carried welcome signs for Algeria and soccer fans. The support also moved through social media, where Sajedah reached 70,000 Algerians through an account tied to L’Algerie fi Kansas City.
Sajedah, her sister and their mother Karima helped run that effort through an Instagram account and Facebook page. Stan Herd, the local artist involved in the welcome campaign, said, “I think everybody’s surprised at it,” then added, “We’re not.”
Rock Chalk Park Draws Thousands
Two days after Algeria arrived, an online campaign helped organize a gathering at Kanza Market in Olathe, Kansas, where hundreds of people showed up, mostly Algerians from the community. Two days later, thousands gathered at Rock Chalk Park, where Algeria trains daily and where the community session was described as the most community focused of the mandated sessions held by teams based in the Kansas City area.
Rock Chalk Park is the home of the University of Kansas women’s soccer team, and Lawrence’s 27,000 University of Kansas students include roughly 30% who are minorities or international students. The city’s response stretched from a hotel sidewalk to a training ground, with Algerian music playing over the loudspeakers and local support turning a routine base camp into one of the World Cup’s most unusual home fields.
