Francisco Gonzalez: “Hard to find places to play in Mexico”

“Mexico would like to join the elite of FootGolf and it is taking longer than expected because course owners and operators are not quite ready in this country, yet. We are now working on different aspects to find the solution for this situation”, says Francisco Gonzalez, the president of the Federacion Mexicana de FootGolf (FMFG).

Francisco Gonzalez, a civil engineer and respected business man in Monterrey Nuevo Leon Mexico, talked about the first steps of FootGolf in his country: “I was introduced to FootGolf by Roberto Balestrini the founder of the American FootGolf League in December 2011 and we started building the federation in January 2012. At the time, we had just a few months to get familiar with the sport before the first World Cup in Budapest, Hungary. Then a group of five members, three players, a FMFG board director and myself represented my country on that magnificent event. That was a fabulous learning experience and we came back home with some good numbers! Francisco de la Garza grabbed the 20th, Tomas Martinez the 42nd and Eduardo Kuri the 61st place.”

About the promotion of our sport to the Mexican nation, Francisco explained, “There are around one hundred courses in the country, most of them are private clubs and reluctant to open their facilities to different activities other than golf.  But, regardless of the difficulties, each year we have tournaments and continue to get involved more and more players. We had organized events in Monterrey, Veracruz, Puebla and Guadalajara in the past. This year we will have FootGolf tournaments in Mexico City and another one in Cancun for very first time and we are very excited about it.”

The next World Cup will be in South America, which is a bit closer to the Mexicans than the first one and, same as other countries, they are preparing for the next World Cup,  “Argentina is an amazing country and the AAFG secured a beautiful place to host the most important tournament in the FootGolf world. We don’t care if It is a ten-hour flight to get there or it is not so easy for us to get courses to practice but, one thing is for sure: Mexico is going to be present at Pilar Country Club in Buenos Aires with our best players. We are not as strong as we want to be, but we will work hard on it participating in a few international tournaments, organizing a few more at home and launching the first Mexican National Championship to determine who is going to represent us in Argentina next year.”