George Lewis Capwell – The Man.

Born on the 1st of July 1902, George Lewis Capwell was fathered by an engineer who was instrumental in the building of the Panama Canal. Due to this he spent a time of his childhood in Panama. It is recorded that even as a youth, Capwell was a great athlete and took particular interest in American Football, Basketball, Baseball and Swimming.

As Capwell became a young man he stood at 1.8meters tall, weighing at about 91kg. A big imposing man that had a natural skill in leadership and organization. Some described him as born leader and a great man to work with. He, like his father, took on an interest in engineering and naturally followed in father’s footsteps. Before returning to Panama, after he graduated, he worked at a power plant in Cuba, as an assistant engineer.

Founding of Emelec

Throughout his life he continued to be a very athletic person and this served him well in 1926 when at age 24, he moved to Guayaquil and started working at Electrica. While working for the company he started a sports club whose name was chosen as an acronym off of each of the letters that made up the companies name – Empresa Electrica del Ecuador. The sports club Emelec was born. In the beginning years the club did not include soccer at all.

In the club he took part in boxing, baseball and basketball. These were of course the only sports that were focussed on in the club. If a new person wished to join the sports club, they had to take part in a boxing match, where they would have to fight against an existing member of the club and then win the fight. In Basketball he played the guard position and in baseball he was a catcher.

The Inclusion Of Soccer

Many of the employees of the company were not too fond of the games that Capwell introduced in the sports club. In roughly 1928 he – at the behest of the employees – started to include soccer in the sports club repertoire. On the 28th of April in 1929 the club’s soccer team was established and sorted. Then on the 17th of September of that very same year The Emelec soccer team was victorious in their first match, defeating Vanguard with a score of 14 – 12.

In 1933 the team won its first league and you can be a winner too if you play the casino slots Argentina offers. The league was made up of teams in Guayaquil that were business backed. Today the Emelec soccer team is the national soccer team of Ecuador and they hold over 13 national titles for their abilities on the field. But this did not happen overnight. It would take the team about 28 years – 1929 to 1957 – before it became recognised as the national team of Ecuador.

The Stadiums First Match

In 1945 the George Lewis Capwell stadium was built in Guayaquil. The stadium was built as a home stadium for the Emelec team. However, the first game to be played at the stadium was not for soccer. The first game at the stadium was a baseball match against the Oriente. Capwell himself played in that very game that inaugurated the stadium.