Supporting the Stormers journey to Thailand

24 players / 9 Nationalities / 1 team

The Stormers of Siem Reap is an incredible sports initiative run as a parent’s association. The idea behind the club was to get the kids both expats and locals participating in football together. The club was set up in 2016 and started with 8 children and has now grown to over 80 children. The coaches are a mixture of parents who give their time for free and local Cambodian coaches who the club are happy to pay for giving up their time to help.

At the beginning of the year, the club had a crazy dream to take a group of the most dedicated kids to an international football competition in Thailand, called the Bangkok Super Cup. At the time even though the club was 80 children strong, most of those children wherein the introductory and intermediary football groups. Therefore, in order to enter an Under 10’s and Under 12’s team, the club had to think outside of the box and decided to join forces with a local club for disadvantaged Cambodian’s.

Joining forces was the start of something incredibly special but it was also the time when the hard reality of how the club was going to get to Thailand really started. Not only did the club have to galvanise and train 24 children to be competitive enough to hold their own against some professional junior clubs that are seasoned competitors in the competition. But they had to raise money for a team’s trip, boots for the kids that were playing barefoot at the time, transport to get to Thailand, the team’s entry to the competition and also 6 passports for the Cambodian Children that had never left their home country before.

This is where we at ‘See Asia Differently’ came to lend a helping hand as we took the sole responsibility of collecting prizes and raising money through a huge raffle which we hosted prior to the tournament on the 3rd May. We collected over 60 prizes, raised over $2,000 and spent over 140 man hours to get the Stormers football club over this finical hurdle and to realise their dream.

The 24 players who have only just recently returned, represented 9 different nationalities played together for one team and represented Cambodia for the very first time on the international stage for junior sport. There were over 120 teams competing and both teams did us extremely proud with the under 10’s and 12’s finishing 16th and 8th in their respective age groups.

Thank you for giving us so many memories and we look forward to supporting the Stormers or another club with similar aspirations in their future sporting ambitions.