A former professional futsal player, Julius Richardson transformed a childhood marked by violence into a strong commitment to the youth of Saint-Martin. Through his association SXM Sports Mouvement, he uses sports to offer future prospects to young people.
“May God bless you with my heart,” is how Julius likes to end his exchanges with others. It is undeniable that Julius exudes tolerance and empathy. However, the thirty-year-old was raised in a completely different climate. “I saw my father hitting my mother when I was very young. I was furious. It was very frustrating to be powerless in the face of all this violence,” Julius confides from the outset. At the age of 6, Julius, his brother, his sister and his mother left the family home and settled in Agrément: “My mother did everything for her three children without asking anyone for anything. It gives me goosebumps.” Nostalgic, Julius remembers spending a good part of his life on the market square in Marigot alongside his mother: “Every day, after school, we went to the market to help mom. She had a souvenir stand. Until adolescence, we learned to do business and become independent thanks to it”. At 12, Julius began to spend more time playing football than going to the markets. Spotted and supported by one of his teachers, the young enthusiast was propelled into a series of school championships that made him want to make a career out of it without further delay: “At 12, I was so impatient and loved football so much that I took my brother's passport, who was 19 at the time, to be able to play in the big division with the Mix Stars team. For two years, I was able to play with them before being discovered and sanctioned”, says Julius.
Between the cracks
He quickly managed to continue playing on the Dutch side of the island: “Football had taken over my heart. So, if I couldn’t play on the French side anymore, I was going to play on the Dutch side.” A few months later, it was when he heard about a futsal tournament that the 14-year-old discovered the sport for the first time: “I decided to sign up and start my own team. I immediately loved the very technical part of futsal. You had to think quickly on the pitch because it was much faster than 11-a-side football. It was shortly after that I was called to join Miami Dade University to train and become a professional futsal player.” Julius would spend 10 years in the United States, making his passion his profession, before a knee injury stopped him at the age of 29. “After three years of convalescence in Saint-Martin, I was expected in Miami. But I decided to stay to develop my associative project,” explains Julius.
The genesis of SXM Sports Movement
Overwhelmed by a youth stuck in a system shaped by drugs and easy money, Julius founded SXM Sports Mouvement in 2019: “Saving these young people through sport means offering them another way of living and considering their future. In this way, they will see that it is possible to earn a living while being trained and competent in a field”. Very angry as a teenager, Julius knows well the fight that young Saint-Martinois are leading today: “When you grow up in the neighborhood, there are a lot of reasons to get angry. I myself often wanted to fight. But the anger I had, I put it into the ball”. To continue to unite around sport, SXM Sports Mouvement is currently organizing inter-neighborhood futsal, baseball and basketball tournaments every weekend at the sports hall. “This year we would like to organize inter-school competitions like when I was a child. Eventually, we would train coaches to support young people from 5 to 18 years old,” Julius says enthusiastically. _LM
Source: Faxinfo https://faxinfo.fr/en/portrait-julius-richardson-la-rage-que-javais-je-lai-mise-dans-le-ballon/
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