Soccer Players Making a Run for the Border

There are two stories today about foreign soccer players abandoning their teams (and their countries) while in the U.S.:

Two players apparently defected from the Cuban national soccer team before Wednesday's Gold Cup match against Honduras at Reliant Stadium.

Forward Lester More went missing at the team's last stop in East Rutherford, N.J., and midfielder Osvaldo Alonso did not return from a group shopping trip in Houston. Their whereabouts were unknown late Wednesday night.

It's not just Cubans, either:

Most of Haiti's under-17 national soccer team apparently deserted the squad during an airport stopover hours before a planned Wednesday trip to South Korea to prepare for the upcoming U17 World Cup.

By Wednesday afternoon, six of the 13 missing players had returned to the airport and turned themselves in to team officials, said Felix Augustin, the Haitian consul in New York. It was unclear where the youngsters had been and why they had left the team, he said.

"All I know is that six of them have been retrieved and we're still looking for the others," he said by telephone.

Most of the team's 18 players, all under age 17, had gone missing from John F. Kennedy International Airport between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, Augustin said.

I'm taking 80 high school orchestra members to New York tomorrow. I'm not anticipating any defections.