The prominent neighbor and public good leader Norberto “Coco” Sánchez celebrated at the 60th Avenue headquarters a night where memories appeared like a burst of the past and a present that has the club in constant progress. While he blew out the candle with the number 89, the entire institution came to the room to also celebrate the 84th anniversary of the neighborhood club founded on March 2, 1942.
From 1972 to 1978 in a first term, and 2002 to 2026, alternating in those periods with some vice presidency, they round out three decades of struggles for love of the shield and the life of the neighborhood where he was born, the one that no nostalgic fails to appropriately name Barriada de Plaza Brandsen – since ’95, renamed by decree as Plaza Presidente Perón.
“Coco”, with his Andalusian blood from four grandparents who arrived in “La América” to forge a future after Spain was struggling with political problems and a civil war in the late 1930s, was born in a house on 26th Street between 61 and 62, on Sunday. March 21, 1937.
While he was still the age of the kid who dreamed of being a soccer player, with a gymnast father who was also a close friend of Pancho Varallo (scorer for the 1930 Lobo champion and figure in the first World Cup), he went out to work whatever it was and with the desire to help. By car, he delivered ice and bread, by bike he was an errand boy for a downtown candy store, he helped in the grocery store and at a service station greasing vehicles, he went from carpenter to automotive locksmith, and from taxi driver to elevator operator in the Police Department. «I had to drop out of high school at Albert Thomas when my dream was to become an engineer. In one of the workers’ schools I had a mechanical technician degree,» he recalled.
The efforts and perseverance bore fruit in 1968, when at the age of twenty-nine, he opened his water pump company, Bymoin partnership with his childhood friend Jorge Moracca. The initials of the business located at 7 and 34 abbreviated the products they sold, Pumps and Office Machines.
In the first hours of today he felt the deep emotion of a hundred guests, family, lifelong friends and business leaders and the institution he presides over, Colonel Brandsen Associationin which he has his son German Sanchez in the dual role of president of football (they won five Amateur League titles) and coordinator of Infrastructure and Works. It is the institution that saw his father born, Jose Sebastian Sancheza prominent bochophile and responsible for his passion for Gymnastics and Fencing La Plataa club that gave him as many happy days as difficult days when he was elected President in December 1980.
Both in Brandsen and in Gimnasia, he managed to crystallize projects. In his neighborhood he has the honor of inaugurating the semi-Olympic swimming pool (heated since 2015) and the restaurant in 1972, in addition to enjoying in recent years a synthetic grass field for women’s hockey and recently a 7-a-side soccer field at the corporate headquarters, inaugurated fifteen days ago.
During his management within Lobo, he put into operation three restaurants, the inauguration of the Sports Center and for the first time there was talk of The Gymnastics when together with the remembered professor Carlos Asnaghi they brought together the first Gimnasia y Esgrima in the country, an idea that this year the brand new board of directors chaired by Carlos Anacleto will work on. Soccer, his passion, had a restructuring starting with Amateur Soccer, leveling and illuminating the auxiliary field of 60 and 118. But despite being in a semifinal, two games away from a dreamed return to A, the ball became infatuated and the following tournament a poor campaign wore out his last days of presidency. He anticipated the end of the mandate with a license. A base remained in the professional squad that would go on to win promotion on December 30, 1984, against Racing, with 75% of footballers who were promoted and hired during his management.
In an unforgettable movement called “La Plata standing”created in 1989 with executive members of the Federation of Institutions of La Plata, toured the city and others to convince that the capital of Buenos Aires needed a re-hierarchization that would restore the brilliance dreamed of by its founders. Thus, they planned the completion of the Highway, the Argentine Theater, the Commercial Free Trade Zone and the Unico Stadium (all completed) and some others that were left in the pipeline, such as the Airport. Many of these works were able to be carried out during the time when Coco Sánchez was president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of La Plata.
On the other hand, it formed the Regional Development Boarda structure in which, based on meetings with the municipalities of La Plata, Berisso, Ensenada, Magdalena and Brandsen, they will ensure that SMEs micro entrepreneurs export products such as honey, snails and hare hides.
When in 1992 people began to talk about the Unico Stadium from the Foundation, which was made up of the two clubs in the City, Coco Sánchez had stepped aside after interceding with the municipal and provincial political arch to obtain the authorization of a Bingo, which was the kickoff of the financing that began the works on 532 and 25.
Half a century passed since he became a businessman and industrialist, with the construction of several buildings. However, his heart beat since he was a child next to his neighborhood club. Today, at 89 years old, he is impressed with what reality shows him. That Brandsen transformation. «I went to the property during a recent day, and I was impressed by the people who go, the number of athletes. Cars inside outside the parking lot, all packed. There was men’s and women’s children’s soccer, hockey and senior soccer. Today Brandsen must be the club that grew the most in the Argentine Republic,» he calculates. But their projects are not standing still behind a ball: the club has a luxurious restaurant and heated pool concession. The rest of the disciplines at the headquarters, such as artistic gymnastics, skating, martial arts, and the soccer school, continue to captivate the neighborhood families who see the constant progress and care of the place.
Don Sánchez does not live to remain on the bronze plate because of his ego, but for the pleasure of seeing so many people enjoying what he projected day and night within his commission. He was rightly named “Featured Neighbor” in the Deliberative Council of the local municipality, a few years ago, in a day where he left his mark as a worker without distinction of political colors.
His particular story has another new side this year, since he began his book. It will be a journey from the soul, the places and characters where he walked, a way of shouting «it is possible, with everything one undertakes.» And he will have eight long decades of neighborhood, because Coco turned 89, and saw the birth of Brandsen, who yesterday also celebrated his 84th birthday. When the club was born, he was just beginning to walk.
