Feature: Grassroot Soccer
From ncaasports.com
By Amy Farnum
The University of Notre Dame men’s soccer team is gearing up for the season, practicing hard and preparing for its opener against No. 2 UCLA on Aug. 31, but first the Irish will take the field for a good cause when they host Northwestern in an exhibition game on Aug. 27.
The match against the Wildcats will benefit Grassroot Soccer, an international AIDS awareness and education organization that reaches youth in Africa through soccer clinics. Admission to the game is $1, and all proceeds will go to the organization.
“It’s a donation game, and you can give a $1 or more if you wish,” said Clark. “We normally get over 2,000 people at that game. It’s something that we can do as a team that really doesn’t require much effort, and maybe it will help someone less fortunate than ourselves.”
Head coach Bobby Clark, and an anonymous Notre Dame soccer alumnus, will match the donation total. It is the fourth year the Irish have held the charity match.
For Clark, the game will be a family affair. His son Tommy, founded Grassroot Soccer after playing for the Bulawayo Highlanders in Zimbabwe and witnessing the devastation of HIV/AIDS first-hand. Tommy, who is now a pediatrician in New Hampshire, played for his father at Dartmouth, before going to Africa to play professionally and teach English. The Clark family had also lived in Zimbabwe for a year when Bobby was the head coach of the Highlanders in 1983.
Tommy Clark developed the idea for Grassroot Soccer while doing his medical residency in Albuquerque, and in 2002, it became a registered 501(c)3 charitable organization.
“There were two main drivers for Grassroot Soccer – one was a lot of people I knew had died of AIDS,” said Tommy Clark. “Life expectancy has gone from 69 to 35 in six years in Zimbabwe. That’s beyond the realm of a Biblical plague, and really quite terrible.”
Clark realized the need for HIV/AIDS education in Zimbabwe and other African nations, and through his experience, he knew that the influence of soccer would serve as a great way to spread the message.
“Our smallest crowds (while playing soccer professionally) were 20,000 people and biggest crowds were 60,000 or 70,000 people,” said Tommy Clark. “Everybody knew who the soccer players were, so I wanted to use that to have an impact on the HIV community.” Former soccer teammates and friends joined Tommy Clark’s effort, and eventually an interactive soccer-themed HIV prevention curriculum was implemented in Zimbabwe in 2003.
“The program targets boys and girls, 12 to 14 years old,” said Tommy Clark. “We mostly work through partnerships with other organizations rather than trying to create infrastructures — we try to find groups interested in our program.”
The organization estimates that 35,000 children have been educated by the program.
In addition, several former college soccer players from the United States have served one-year commitments as field interns to help run the program in Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Zambia. The interns learn a 20-hour curriculum that involves 16 different activities. They learn how to teach the program, and then train others how to do it.
“We’ve had a lot of American kids go over to help out,” said Tommy Clark. “It’s sort of become a Peace Corps for soccer players.”
Currently, 13 former student-athletes are participating in the program, including four from Dartmouth.
“It is a great experience for these youngsters to go to Africa,” said Bobby Clark. “Soccer is God in Africa and this is the one way you can get to youngsters and get them to pay attention.”
The Clarks hope that Notre Dame’s Alumni Field is filled to its’ 2,500-seat capacity for the game in order to raise the most money they can for the organization.
“It’s a very worth-while cause and it just makes sense,” said Bobby Clark. “I hope we get more people than we can handle because that means that it will cost me more money.”
Notre Dame and Northwestern will kick off at 7 p.m., on Monday. The Irish open their home schedule on Sept. 7 against Rhode Island.