OAKLAND GENESIS SOCCER CLUB CORPORATION
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Mission Statement
For Oakland Genesis Soccer Club, soccer is a tool to empower, educate, and inspire Oakland's leaders of tomorrow. Alongside free professional soccer coaching, Oakland Genesis provides participants with transportation, academic support and enrichment, mentorship, college readiness and recruitment support, and health and wellness education. The core of our mission is inclusivity. We deliver cost-free youth development programming to Oakland youth from underserved communities, channeling their passion for soccer into personal growth, educational achievement and life success.
About This Cause
Oakland Genesis is proud to announce its acceptance into the All Stars Helping Kids Accelerator Program as part of the 2022 cohort. Equalizing access to opportunity is at the heart of everything we do. Our youth development organization was founded to address a pervasive issue in competitive club soccer: inequality. In Oakland, competitive club soccer participants can expect to spend roughly $3,000 in team-related fees each year, not including cleats, jerseys, equipment, supplemental training sessions, and travel costs. They also can expect to spend about seven hours a week transporting themselves to and from practices and games. Those expectations present insurmountable challenges for many talented, low-income youth in Oakland passionate about soccer. The result is an unequal, pay-to-play system that offers competitive club soccer to a narrow group of well-resourced youth, dramatically lowering involvement in organized soccer, particularly among low-income youth of color. These barriers carry long-term implications. For aspiring college athletes, participation in costly club leagues is effectively a prerequisite for recruitment. According to national data, 95% of female and 93% of male college soccer players play competitive club soccer during their high school years. These inequities devalue athletes who play on school soccer teams and prevent talented youth from accessing the benefits of organized club teams. We believe this system needs to be disrupted. Oakland Genesis is guided by the belief that team sports can profoundly impact a child's social emotional development and academic achievement and positively impact the trajectory of their lives. Data shows that team sports reduces chronic school absences, detention and suspension rates, and improves grades. They provide structured after-school environments while parents are working, encourage collaboration and cooperation, and nurture goal-setting skills and diligence. What’s more, as the data above on college athletes demonstrates, sports provide a vital pathway to higher education, particularly for youth who may be first-generation students and unsure if college is a viable option. Oakland Genesis has five cornerstone programs: competitive soccer, academic advising, college counseling and recruitment support, and transportation. These are provided at no cost to participants so that a child's participation does not depend on their family’s finances. A week for a team in the program includes three instruction days and three soccer days. Passion for soccer gets youth into the program but equally important is academic achievement. For this reason, we require that each participant meet a standard of academic engagement to remain in the program, working with teachers at school and contracted instructors to ensure this engagement is maintained (no minimum GPA is required). Instruction includes one dedicated day of math, one English/literacy, and one study hall where instruction is tied to schoolwork. Our philosophy prioritizes personal development over player development. We believe that a child’s involvement in soccer can provide them with valuable skills that can extend throughout their lives. Our goal is to begin with participants in middle school and work with them through high school so they have options when they graduate. We will support participants in meeting college requirements and completing college applications if their choice is higher education. We will help them contact coaches, create highlight videos, and navigate the recruitment process if they wish to play on a college team. Before that choice can be made available to everyone, however, club soccer must be made accessible. Transportation, additionally, is vital to making this model succeed. To truly equalize access across all income groups—and provide players with the academic support needed to graduate high school and attend college—all of our programming requires round trip transportation. To understand the scope of our work, we ask you to consider the lives of three kids who love soccer but come from dramatically different backgrounds. The first, Katie, comes from a high-income family with two working parents. Katie’s family can afford a live-in Au Pair at the cost of $20,000 per year, not including food, utilities, etc. The Au Pair drives Katie to and from school, practices, games, private training sessions, tutoring, and more, and is adaptable for the inevitable schedule changes in Katie’s life. Katie lives and goes to school in Rockridge, Oakland, and plays soccer in Oakland with her club team, Montclair Soccer Club, a 30-minute drive from home and school. Montclair Soccer Club plays in the NorCal Premier League and has games in Mill Valley, Morgan Hill, Pittsburgh, and Sacramento frequently. Montclair's coaches are part of a soccer network connecting players with college coaches and making sure that their players are scouted. Families on Katie’s team can afford to play in expensive soccer camps and tournaments where college coaches scout players, can make highlight videos to send to coaches, and are constantly reinforcing the expectation that Katie will attend college. Our second soccer lover, Sabrina, lives in Oakland in a single-parent household. Sabrina’s mother works full-time to provide for Sabrina and her two siblings but cannot afford the $3,000 in fees each year for Sabrina to play club soccer. She also cannot consistently drive Sabrina to practices and games, as her minimum-wage restaurant job has erratic work hours and occasionally requires her to work on nights and weekends. But Sabrina is independent and determined, as well as a talented soccer player. And luckily for Sabrina, the Bay Oaks Soccer Club offers a scholarship position on the roster to one talented player who cannot afford the fees. Sabrina now has the opportunity to play on a team that challenges her every day. She can play in games scouted by college recruiters, is surrounded by teammates who have goals to play in college, who study, who eat nutritious meals, and who expect to get a higher education. The scholarship, however, does not help Sabrina with transportation. For a young teenager, she does an outstanding job of finding ways to get herself to team events by taking public transit when her mom is working but is frequently forced to be late or miss out entirely on practices and games. The third youth, Freddie, is less fortunate. Freddie, like Sabrina, lives in Oakland and is a talented soccer player. Freddie’s family immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala 6 years ago. His mother doesn’t speak much English and works in hospitality, while his father—a day laborer—works as much as he can. His family cannot afford the fees for club soccer and does not own a vehicle. Freddie buses to school with his books and ball, playing soccer at recess, lunch, after school, whenever he can. His English is steadily improving, but he struggles with his grades—and unfortunately, his GPA was not high enough to qualify for his recreational middle school team in 2019. Without a pathway to soccer like Sabrina was offered, and without the ability to play on his school team, it would appear that Freddie was unable to participate in a sport that could provide him with tremendous benefits and help him feel more connected to his new community. For reasons largely out of his control, he was excluded from club soccer. Oakland Genesis met Freddie at its free soccer clinic programming at Elmhurst Middle School in 2019. Since then, with encouragement from coaches and their ability to support Freddie with his schooling and transportation improved his self-esteem inside and outside of the classroom. He spends more time on schoolwork without getting frustrated and feeling bad about himself; asks his teachers for clarification on assignments without feeling embarrassed; enjoys school; and, slowly but surely, has brought his GPA to a level that he can be proud of. Now, Freddie is playing on a competitive soccer team and fantasizes about becoming the next Messi. He has taken to calling himself Diosito, or little god, a reference to Messi’s mythical status in soccer, a nickname that has stuck with his teammates. He has a community of support on his team and with our coach-mentors, and he has something to look forward to every day when he wakes up. These short stories illuminate the profound personal impact that team sports can have on young athletes. But they also represent the stark realities of today’s unequal system. Katie, for example, has options and a support network. If she applies herself and works hard, she will develop her soccer skills to a level that will allow her to play in college. She will have the academic support to ensure she performs well on her SATs and in her classes and will eventually graduate from a reputable university with a degree that will help set her up for lifelong success. Sabrina, too, can access opportunities. She won the only scholarship position on her club soccer team. But scholarships are rare and Sabrina got lucky. For determined, talented, and desirous players like Sabrina, it is an uphill battle to break into a system that prioritizes those that can pay. Without her scholarship and dedication to finding transportation, Sabrina would not be playing club soccer. Her friend group would be different, and the expectation that she attend college could diminish. Sabrina’s network would shrink, and she would have to find other outlets to build the skills learned practicing, goal-setting, failing and achieving. And finally, for Freddie, playing soccer on a club team is more than an uphill battle—the barriers of cost and transportation fundamentally exclude him from participating. These aren’t insurmountable challenges, but few are trying to change the system that creates them. By reaching underserved communities, Oakland Genesis will celebrate and reward passion for soccer instead of wealth and income level.