Soccer fan gets the ball rolling

NEWPORT BEACH — Trevor Slavick is a soccer nut.

That’s why he plays in a Newport Beach adult soccer league. It’s the reason he coaches a girls’ soccer team in Laguna Beach. And it helps explain why he’s sent more than 23,000 soccer balls to people around the world.

He’s mailed soccer balls to soldiers in Iraq and orphans in Guatemala, Kenya, and elsewhere, all through a charity called Little Feet, which he and a college friend founded.

Now Slavick is looking for more soldiers who can distribute the donated balls, and he plans to deliver them to poor children in as many countries as he can. “We’re going to start doing this all over the world,” he said in an interview at his Newport Beach home.

The idea was born in Honduras. Slavick, 36, works as a pilot for American Airlines when he’s not playing soccer, so he’s a well-traveled guy.

In 1999 he was visiting Honduras, and he was touched by what he saw. “When you get off the airplane there’s hundreds of kids that come running up, and they want to shine your shoes for 25 cents,” he said.

One of the kids was wearing a sports jersey, so Slavick decided to give him a soccer ball he’d brought along.

As Slavick was leaving, he said, “I looked over, and they had all dropped the shoeshine boxes that they had and they were playing soccer with this ball I gave them.”

That experience piqued his interest, but the catalyst was his college friend, Steffan Tubbs. Now a Denver radio host, Tubbs has worked for ABC News and Fox. He spent a month embedded with a military unit in Iraq and told Slavick about it.

“He saw the soldiers giving kids balls…. They said they’re like gold there. It helps them make friends,” Slavick said.

But one more thing had to happen to bring it all together. Tubbs mentioned on the radio that he wanted to send soccer balls to Iraq, but he wasn’t sure logistically how to do it. Right away he got an e-mail from Alice Clement, who develops business for the sporting goods store chain Sports Authority.

When Tubbs was broadcasting from Iraq, Clement said, “I just listened and I thought it was really interesting.”

She wasn’t sure at first how to get balls to soldiers, but she knew she could figure it out, and she did: Get addresses and mail them directly to soldiers, who can hand them out.

So in March of this year, Slavick and Tubbs formed a charity called Little Feet, Big Goals, and everything came together.

Sports Authority agreed to put up posters in their stores and collect donations for soccer balls. Cobi Jones, a soccer pro who plays for the Los Angeles Galaxy, offered to be a spokesman for the charity.

Irvine-based Mikasa, which makes balls for soccer and other sports, fills the orders for donated balls and ships them, and the company throws in extra balls and pumps for free.

Mikasa President Richard McCoy, a former Marine, was eager to participate, and the feedback so far has been great, said Jordan Poznick, Mikasa’s western sales and marketing manager.

“At one point, I got a phone call from a soldier, all staticky — he’s calling me from Iraq,” Poznick said. “He said, ‘How did you get my name? This is unbelievable.’ ”

Those are the kind of responses Slavick said he’s been getting. Now he’s branching out, sending shipments of balls to orphanages in South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, and other countries. And in February he plans to personally deliver soccer balls to El Salvador.

“I want to go to places where kids otherwise couldn’t play,” he said.

Slavick is glad to share soccer with people he’ll never meet, and the messages he gets back are the icing.

The balls also seem to make life more bearable for U.S. troops who receive them, as Slavick gathered from this e-mail from an unidentified soldier in Iraq.

“What do you do when it’s 128 degrees, you are getting a break from trolling for IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and are spending the day at the gas station trying to supervise distribution to reduce the black market fuel. We play a spontaneous game of ball with the local little kids. Kids, of course kept the ball when we were done. You’re folk’s donations of balls made this possible. Thanks again.”