Street Soccer Portland aims to reduce barriers to playing soccer, especially for low-income youth

Street Soccer Portland is part of a national organization that aims to expand access to playing soccer by providing a free alternative to the pay-to-play model of club soccer. The local chapter primarily serves elementary and middle school-aged children through afterschool programs currently being offered at 20 schools and community centers in Portland, Tigard, Gresham and Vancouver. Partnerships and donations from companies like Adidas and Nike help provide free uniforms and equipment to participants, most of whom are low-income and would otherwise not be able to afford the hundreds of dollars a youth club soccer team would likely charge to join.

Since joining Street Soccer Portland two years ago, Program Director Julian Alexander has expanded participation in the organization by more than 140%, from roughly 1,000 to nearly 2,400 participants last year. Program Coordinator Saul Meneses Zurita is now helping coach the next generation of players after first playing in one of Street Soccer Portland’s afterschool programs 11 years ago. Alexander and Zurita join us to share the impact Street Soccer Portland is having on and off the field. They’ll also share details about the annual spring tournament that hundreds of fourth and fifth graders will compete in next Friday at Davis Elementary School in Gresham.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Street Soccer Portland is part of a national organization that aims to expand access to soccer by providing a free alternative to the pay-to-play model of club teams. The local chapter primarily serves elementary and middle school children, but it also has teams for teens and adults. Julian Alexander is the nonprofit’s program director. Participation has more than doubled since they took over two years ago. Saul Meneses Zurita played in a Street Soccer Portland after-school program back in 2016. He’s now helping coach the next generation of players as a program coordinator.

Julian and Saul, welcome to you both.

Julian Alexander: Hey, thanks for having us.

Saul Meneses Zurita: Hello. Thank you for having us.

Miller: Julian, first – my understanding is you used to work in affordable housing. How did you go from affordable housing to a soccer-focused nonprofit?

Alexander: Yeah, I was focused on digital literacy programs for non-English speakers. And after, there was a futsal court that was right next to the program that I was leading. Every day it was full of kids that wanted to play and I had started playing there. I was slowly building a relationship with some of these kids. I was like, “if you take our class about digital skill building, I’ll coach a soccer team for you.”

Miller: Bribery?

Alexander: [Laughs] Yeah. Whatever you want, because they were just so invested in playing the sport. And that just grew so much, where kids would be out there till 10 or 11 o’clock at night. So I started looking for other organizations that were doing that work. I was never a coach. I just was a player at that point. I found Street Soccer USA doing similar stuff, and I was like, this is exactly the intersection of all of the things that I’m interested in life and the way that I view sort of community-building.

It was a very grassroots thing of like, how can I make this happen for these kids that I care about and want to see succeed? Then I got to make the leap a little bit over two years ago and it’s just grown so quickly.

Miller: What options did those kids, who just glommed onto that court … what other options do you think they had to play soccer?

Alexander: I don’t think they had any. A lot of families we serve, making the investment to spend $2,000-plus uniforms plus cleats to be able to play, means the difference between maybe paying bills or putting food on the table. So a lot of the kids that we serve want to play, will play in the streets if we let them, but don’t have the funds to join the club structure that exists in America.

We were able to grow from like 200 kids in 2022, to over 2,000 in 2024, because kids everywhere across the city just don’t have a place to play. We do it for free with coaches that come from those communities. A lot of them went to those same schools. And that growth is just because the community wants us there and I think there’s even more opportunity actually, there’s even more kids that we’re not serving that we could be.

Miller: So folks who don’t have kids right now, or are not that familiar with the way soccer and some other sports work in the U.S. or in Portland now, they may be confused by this thousands-of-dollars-for-clubs system. What I think of maybe as an old model of public school teams, where maybe you have to pay for cleats, but you’re not paying thousands of dollars. Is that still a part of sports in America?

Meneses Zurita: Yeah, definitely. It’s just starting to grow again. It kind of goes up and down, depending on the funds or the amount of kids that are interested in the sport. Back in my day, when I was younger, we were lucky enough to have a PE coach who liked soccer and decided to make a team. And then thankfully there were other schools around our area that also had teams. So we got to scrimmage them for free. It was once a week and then we did training, and that’s kind of what we’re trying to start up again with the schools we work with.

Right now, we get to coach at elementary schools and some middle schools. Now, we have a tournament coming up, so we’re trying to provide them that and just get them started on their journey. We know not everyone might keep going, but hopefully it’ll be something that they can look back on and really appreciate – the friendships they made, the experiences they had, and just the overall fun that they got to have with their friends and at school. And something they can really look back on and be like, “wow, I had such a great childhood growing up.”

Miller: I mentioned that you are a coach and a program coordinator now, but nine, 10 years ago, you were a kid, a participant. What did it mean to you to take part in Street Soccer Portland 10 years ago?

Meneses Zurita: Yeah, I mean, it was great. I was young, so back then I obviously didn’t think about my future or anything. I was focused on my day-to-day experiences, just going out, trying new things, playing with my friends. I was big into soccer, still am, but back then I was like, “oh, I really want to focus on soccer, it’s something I wanna do or at least keep in my life.”

I got to meet a lot of new people. I got to explore Portland. I got to play against other people of different skill levels, which helped me improve and motivated me to wanna be better. I loved what they did. And thankfully, now I can go ahead and give back to the community that I’m from and other people that I meet through work.

Miller: Julian, can you give us a sense for some of the specific young communities that you work hardest to reach out to?

Alexander: Yeah, I think there’s two main folks that we’re really focused on right now. We deal with a lot of first-generation or migrant kids, and especially a lot of undocumented folks. And our priority has been to create a space where they feel safe, comfortable and empowered to play, but also, when they need resources and they need support in other avenues of their life, that they trust us and they feel comfortable expressing those wants and needs. So a lot of the time we’re frontline. Parents might not speak English. We often have coaches that can help them navigate the school system if that could be. We also have direct ties to other organizations that provide support for either legal issues that might come up or housing issues, from my connections to affordable housing.

So we really want to use soccer as a tool to have fun and build community, like Saul said, but also to build that trust so that when folks need support or need help – and we’ve seen that increase with not only our impact, but also just sort of the current climate that we live in – that more and more families are reaching out to us to find ways to navigate sort of a challenging system. And then …

Miller: [Has] that always sort of baked into the model, or is it more that you had these relationships and then you see people in need, so you help them because you know them? I mean, is the plan from the beginning, build trust and then help people broadly in their lives, or was that a kind of accident?

Alexander: I think we were pretty intentional about it. When you create when you get a bunch of kids together, I think no matter where they’re from issues are going to arise and we want to make sure that we’re providing support for them. So I think we were intentionally looking to create a community, and be careful and do due diligence with that. But also, I think some of the problems and successes that we’ve seen have come because we’ve just happened to foster that community that comes from a bunch of different countries. We had, I think, nine languages spoken on the pitch at one point on one field.

Miller: On one field?

Alexander: Yeah.

Miller: Wow

Alexander: And I think that speaks to how soccer can really break down a lot of those barriers and we can use it to communicate. I didn’t speak Burmese, but there were players there that were really invested in playing together and wanted a space to play. And then we found a way to connect them to a different school system, to clubs, other sports clubs if they’re interested.

We really just want people to succeed in soccer if they’re interested in that. But also off the pitch … and I think Saul and I both serve as examples. We love soccer. It’s been a huge part of our lives, but we’re not Messi, right? We’re never going to play professionally. But you can use soccer as a tool to build community, to have an impact on folks in ways that maybe when you’re young, you don’t even see as a possibility.

Miller: You said Messi, I got confused for a second. You’re not Lionel Messi and you’re also just not messy.

Alexander: [Laughs] Yeah.

Miller: Just imagining kids all playing together, who come from families where nine different languages are spoken, maybe that answers the question I’m about to ask. But do you think that this model could work with any other sport?

Alexander: I personally don’t think so. I think soccer is kind of the sport of the workers of the proletariat …

Miller: … And the world, too.

Alexander: Yeah. And all you need is a ball and friends, enemies, colleagues, whoever, and you can kind of get folks together and have a good time.

I would also say that there are folks doing this for other sports that are invested and we want to lift them up too. But I think just soccer is so accessible and so easy and so worldwide – I went to Ecuador and played. I went to Barcelona and played. I go to Tigard and play in my own local community spot that I’ve never been to before. I’d be able to make friends and connections there through soccer, and I can’t really see that happening with other sports.

Miller: Saul, what’s it been like for you to be a coach after being a player in this program?

Meneses Zurita: Oh, it’s been phenomenal. Honestly, I really look back in time and kind of think of what I thought as a player. I remember growing up. Sometimes you don’t always like what the coach says and sometimes you’re like, “what does he know?” Like, “he’s talking crazy.” But I think the thing I always remember is certain things my coach said, like, “hey, you won’t have this time forever, enjoy it while you can.” And looking back at it, now I’m telling my kids that. I’m like, “Hey, you guys, this is the time to enjoy, have fun, make new connections. Be kind to each other, uplift one another. And hopefully, in the future, you’ll be able to look back on it and be like, ‘wow, coach was right. I should have never doubted him.’” But I know how it is to be a kid. I was there.

Miller: [Laughs] “I should have never doubted Saul.”

Julian, we’ve been talking about kids and that seems like that’s really at the heart of what this program offers. But there are adults as well. What adult programs do you have?

Alexander: Yeah, we have two. One that’s just focused on older adults that want to connect with the sport that are at risk or houseless. And I think that it’s, again, kind of a similar methodology. It’s a tool that we can use to provide support when asked, but it’s kind of a, “you want to come show up, play,” that’s the only thing that we ask from those folks.

We also have a club for adults with developmental disabilities called the Super Cats. And that’s just because they wanted to get active. They’re invested in sports, they love the Timbers. And we’re like, “OK, let’s let’s do it.” Let’s figure out a way to make this accessible to folks that … I think one of our players was 65 and had never touched a soccer ball before.

And even in two years, there’s been phenomenal growth for everybody, for kids and adults to still grow as a player, and just to be more physically healthy. It’s been pretty amazing to see.

Miller: How do you think about measuring the impact or assessing if all this is working?

Alexander: I think one is just growth and this is our first really public thing that we’ve done. We’ve grown through word of mouth and other folks just saying, “You’re going to love what Saul’s doing, you’re going to love what our other coaches are doing. You need to bring them to your school or you need to bring them to your field.” And I think that has shown a lot of success.

Then I also think, for the teams and schools that we’re in, we’ve seen a markable decrease in absenteeism, almost 60% decrease across the board for all participants of those 2,000. Then about one in three of our players received some sort of social services referral. And I think that comes from trust. It’s hard to ask for support when applying to SNAP benefits or college. And I think it’s been really phenomenal to see the community have that trust that we can kind of steward them along some of those problems or issues.

Miller: And Saul, briefly, what’s going to happen at the Street Soccer tournament a week from today?

Alexander: Yeah, we have eight elementary schools that will be participating. Each team has about 20 to 30 players. We hope to give them each three games. So that’ll be exciting. And then from there, everyone will be getting participation trophies, and we’ll be providing a best sportsmanship award to a team that our coaches and refs think have demonstrated good qualities.

Miller: Saul and Julian, thanks so much.

Meneses Zurita: Thank you.

Alexander: Thanks for having us.

Miller: Saul Meneses Zurita is a coach and a program coordinator for the nonprofit Street Soccer PDX. Julian Alexander is program director for the nonprofit.

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