“Summer of Soccer” series<\/a> designed to bring World Cup excitement to communities outside Philadelphia.<\/p>\n“To give people that opportunity to celebrate, to watch games for free right in their own communities,” Cepeda-Freytiz said.<\/p>\n
The watch party gave fans a chance to enjoy the World Cup close to home without traveling to Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
In a city with a strong Latino community, many said that’s what made the event special.<\/p>\n
“This is a phenomenal activity that Reading is doing for all the residents here. World Cup fever. Us Latinos, we live for this sport,” said Reading resident Elvis Narv\u00e1ez.<\/p>\n
Narv\u00e1ez has been playing soccer since he was 5 years old. Now he coaches local teams and says soccer has a way of bringing neighbors together.<\/p>\n
“Why not have it in your own city where you just got to walk, bring a chair, get with neighbors and enjoy the game?” he said.<\/p>\n
Among those in the crowd was another lifelong soccer player, Elizabeth Estrada.<\/p>\n
“Just like being in the atmosphere of people that love to play and watch soccer that brings all the community together. It really, really makes me happy,” Estrada said.<\/p>\n
Organizers say this is just the start of a Summer of Soccer that will continue with more events across the region.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. \u2014 Thursday saw a victory for Mexico and plenty of smiles for downtown Reading. For hours,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217151,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[53998,13822,28,736,128,130,129,11868,94952,2236],"class_list":["post-217150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-latino-community","tag-mexico","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-soccer","tag-summer-of-soccer","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}