FMFooty<\/a>, that’s seeing that inspiration firsthand.<\/p>\nFMFooty founder Francis Barilo said he started the club during the COVID pandemic as a company to help people train online. Since then, it’s evolved into a full-on soccer club with training programs.<\/p>\n
The club features 26 teams, with 250 students. It helps train around 1,000 athletes.<\/p>\n
“It’s been fun,” he said.<\/p>\n
Girls Director Meghan Foley said the club was just in Denver, Colorado for the MPL National Playoffs. The girls group worked throughout the spring and fall to get to this point, she said.<\/p>\n
They competed on the national stage in their first year playing together,\u00a0Foley said.<\/p>\n
“We can’t wait to be back next year,” she said.<\/p>\n
FMFooty athlete Thomas Pojanowski said he’s excited to see people in the region getting involved in soccer. He said people who weren’t interested in the sport before are now watching the\u00a0World Cup games and following all the teams.<\/p>\n
He said the U.S. team made a good run before being eliminated after a loss to Belgium.<\/p>\n
Who is he rooting for? “I would like England to win,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BETHLEHEM TWP., Pa. – The World Cup wraps up this weekend, and for a lot of young athletes,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154,1994,74106],"class_list":["post-244009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-bethlehem-township","tag-the-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244009","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=244009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}