Founder's Story

From an early age, I have always been immersed in the world of soccer. While I was growing up, my father, Bobby Clark, traveled around the globe as a player on the Scottish national team and would bring home gifts from his travels: a lasso from Argentina, a wooden lion from China – all tokens I kept that reminded me of soccer’s reach around the world. 

When I was 14, I had a chance to experience soccer’s global influence firsthand when my family moved to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe after my dad accepted a coaching position for Highlanders FC, one of the country’s top professional clubs. 

Living in Zimbabwe was the most formative experience of my life. Despite the many differences between my family’s upbringing and the local Matabele culture, we always felt welcomed thanks to our shared love of soccer. I have many fond memories of playing soccer and wandering the dusty townships of Bulawayo with my friends and teammates. These were wonderful, carefree years; HIV had yet to unleash the full power of its devastation.

With increasing political instability in Zimbabwe, my family moved to the U.S., where my dad was appointed head coach of the men’s soccer team at Dartmouth College. Not long after, I would soon attend Dartmouth and play under him.

But Zimbabwe still called to me. So after graduating from Dartmouth, I returned to Bulawayo, where I worked with local children teaching English and coaching soccer while also playing professionally for Highlanders — the same team my dad had coached almost a decade earlier. 

Every day as I walked to practice, I was followed by a group of children who would abandon their pick-up soccer games to join me on my walk, practicing their English as I practiced my Ndebele. Over time, the group of children grew as word spread that a Mukiwa (white man) and professional soccer player was in their community. On these walks, I began to see even more clearly the power that soccer – and role models – held for young people in these communities.

Zimbabwe, however, had changed since I first arrived as a teenager. City squares that had teemed with artisans selling crafts and vendors selling food and staples were now empty. European tourists who had roamed the graceful streets of Bulawayo were conspicuously absent. Families were missing uncles, mothers, sisters, and grandparents.

AIDS had struck.

My teammates and I attended funerals and paid respects to families who had lost loved ones from this mysterious and unnamed illness. And yet, I realized that I never had a single conversation about HIV the entire time I was there. We were all subject to the prevailing culture of silence and denial. Even while people were struck down in scores all around, communities remained mute.

I left Zimbabwe a year later to return to Dartmouth to attend medical school. Over the next four years, I continually received reports that more and more of my Zimbabwean friends had died. 

As I considered my experiences living and playing soccer in Zimbabwe, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the sport – and the role models who played it – could somehow help break through the deafening silence surrounding HIV. 

A chance meeting with Dr. Albert Bandura, the Stanford sociologist famous for articulating the Social Learning Theory of how role models can affect behavior change, gave me confidence that I was on the right track. 

Following medical school, during the intern year of my pediatrics residency training at the University of New Mexico, my ideas began to crystallize. During a month-long rotation focused on community advocacy, I developed a proposal to employ Zimbabwean professional soccer players as HIV educators in their communities. When my rotation ended, I decided to pursue my idea further. 

I joined forces with a few friends who had also played for Highlanders in Zimbabwe: Methembe Ndlovu, a Zimbabwean who captained his country’s national team and also played at Dartmouth; Kirk Friedrich, a teammate who I first met in New Mexico; and Ethan Zohn, who was a recent winner of CBS’s Survivor: Africa. Together, we formed Grassroot Soccer. 

In late 2002, the four of us traveled to Bulawayo to meet with community leaders, school headmasters, and focus groups of children and teachers. Based on what we heard from the community, we planned a pilot project that was launched in January 2003. We worked with a consultant to develop a culturally appropriate soccer-based HIV curriculum, then recruited and trained 14 local soccer players, including men and women, as mentor Coaches to run the programs for young people. 

And with that, Grassroot Soccer was born.

An initial research study of the pilot, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, proved that our model — using soccer, trained mentor Coaches, and a fun and supportive environment — was an effective way to engage young people in HIV/AIDS prevention programming and equip them with life-saving health information. This gave us the confidence that what we were on to worked.

Since that point more than two decades ago, we’ve expanded to more than 60 countries through our affiliate sites and partnerships, and gone from working with 1,500 adolescents through our pilot in Zimbabwe to reaching more than 25 million young people with life-saving health information, services, and mentorship.

Critically, we’ve also evolved from a disease focus to an integrated adolescent health focus, using soccer to empower young people to overcome their most pressing and interconnected health challenges – including not just HIV/AIDS but also mental health, gender-based violence, and issues related to sexual and reproductive health like teen pregnancy.

The heart of Grassroot Soccer continues to be the trained young adult Coaches from the community who are the ones bringing our programs to young people and serving as valuable role models, mentors, and leaders. We trained 14 Coaches for our pilot; we’ve now trained more than 23,000.

The initial Gates-funded research study that proved the effectiveness of our model set us on our course to make research a central part of our work. Since that original study, we’ve conducted more than 60 research studies (including seven randomized-controlled trials) and partnered with leading research institutions to continually improve our programs – and contribute valuable insights to the fields of adolescent health and sport for development. 

For me, Grassroot Soccer has been the culmination of my life’s experiences – from growing up in a soccer family, to my formative adolescent years in Zimbabwe, to becoming a pediatrician, to seeing soccer’s global power for good around the world time and again. 

Soccer has the power to change lives. I’m so proud of the impact our programs have created and the incredible work our Coaches are doing with young people every single day. 

But our work isn’t done, and the need remains high. I hope you’ll become a part of the Grassroot Soccer movement and join our efforts to equip young people with the knowledge and skills they need to thrive.

Together, we’re Playing for Life.