Lippert Components employees in the hundreds were brought together under the unifying banner of sport Saturday for the company’s first soccer tournament at Goshen College in Indiana.
This story by John Kline originally appeared in The Goshen News.
A first for Lippert, a supplier of components to the RV, residential housing and numerous other industries, the tournament was the brainchild of Julio Cruz Reyes, a cultural integration coordinator for Lippert and one of the main organizers of the soccer matches.
“We have a division called Cultural Integration, and one of the things we decided to do is, we understood that sports is something that can bring people from many different backgrounds together, the love of sport,” Cruz Reyes said. “You can have many differences, but we all have that one thing in common. So that’s one thing that we decided to do is, give it a try, and let’s see the response from our team members, and go from there.”
Having anticipated maybe eight to 10 teams signing up to participate in the inaugural tournament, Cruz Reyes said he was pleasantly surprised to learn that the idea had really resonated with the company’s employees across multiple plants, garnering an overwhelming amount of buy-in.
“We ended up having more than 500 team members participating in this event,” Cruz Reyes said. “We have about 34 different teams, both men’s and women’s teams. And these are all Lippert team members, and all the teams are from different plants. So, all the plants are being represented.”
Kicking off bright and early at 8 a.m., teams battled it out on the Goshen College practice fields throughout most of the day, eventually concluding with championship games for the top teams in late afternoon.
