If you're always touching the ball, you're going to get comfortable with the ball.
And when you're comfortable with the ball, you're comfortable with the ball in practice.
Once you're good in practice, you're good in games.
The first time I started playing soccer was when I was six years old.
I got really hooked on it.
From there, I just kind of took off.
What my dad always says is, you get to do what you love to do today, and you can go
out there and have fun.
My name's Ethan King, and I'm 14 years old, and I'm the founder of Charity Ball.
I got the idea to start Charity Ball after I went to Muslim Week with my dad for the
first time.
He was going there to fix some water wells.
I brought along my soccer ball because, you know, I wasn't really interested in doing
a bunch of mechanical work.
Along with a team, we were restoring wells that had broken down.
He had brought a soccer ball because it was his thing.
As soon as I brought the soccer ball, it was like a swarm of people, but I noticed after
I kind of took a break and then looked down, some of the kids had just sat down their old
soccer balls, which were just basically a bunch of plastic bags wrapped up with twine.
The mind of playing is there.
Kids find other ways to make balls.
I just felt so bad knowing that they called it a soccer ball, and that's all they had.
He realized that these kids had never touched a real soccer ball.
When he showed up with this thing and saw the smiles and the stars in their eyes, something
happened internally.
For him to have, you know, five or six, seven soccer balls and for these kids not to have
one didn't make sense.
If someone, for example, a kid loves the game of soccer, they don't have just a basic ball
to actually enjoy the game, there's something that needs to be done about that.
I gave away my soccer ball to some of the kids in the village, wanted to keep doing
it because I saw all the excitement that the kids had.
On the flight back, he just said, hey dad, I really enjoyed doing that, and I think I'd
like to do more of that.
I came up with the idea of charity balls to distribute and handle over new quality soccer
balls to kids around the world who are less fortunate so that they can have the same opportunities
as I do.
I was 10 when I started it.
As I started my foundation, I looked for partner organizations that do good work.
He's like, my name's Devin Sabotic and I play professional soccer, but I really have a desire
to help kids.
It was such a unique story.
You have a kid that's 14, has been doing this for a couple of years.
I think any other 12 to 13, 14 year olds will probably be playing PlayStation the whole
day and wouldn't even worry about what other kids in the world are doing and how he could
help them.
I look for organizations where I could use the fame that I have to help.
He wants to help out, he wants to give other kids a chance to play a beautiful game and
experience it in their own ways with a real soccer ball.
They got to get hand delivered, that's part of the deal because people donate money to
make this happen.
We can't just ship a box and leave them.
We just want to make sure that the balls that are hand delivered are quality so that they
can last longer in these types of places.
In this situation, we decided to pinpoint schools.
By hand delivering balls to schools, it ensures that you've got an adult who really cares
about the kids.
They can make sure that those balls are being used, make sure they don't run off.
We hope to not only attract the kids, but keep them there in school healthy so they can
focus on their studies.
The Play Well Cup project has made it possible for roughly 40 schools to receive brand new
quality soccer balls.
The high hopes is that by having your own ball, you can maybe think in different terms.
You can think beyond the status quo, $25 can ensure that a ball will actually end up in
the hands of a child.
Putting a ball on a kid's hands has allowed them to have fun and it promotes a healthy
lifestyle and teamwork and team building and builds the community up as well.
We can occupy the kids to have activities to do instead of just going around to doing
better things.
We're at one of the soccer fields and we started putting up the net.
It's crazy, like all these kids just showed up.
Back in the U.S., you'd be kicking a soccer ball in the field and very rare that someone
would just come and play with you.
Soon as we threw in a ball, everyone understood what it was about.
It was just a mass of people and everybody was chasing the ball.
You could not speak the language, but if you have the ball, everybody speaks the same language.
Football, unify people.
Soccer is the universal language.
One soccer ball, all of a sudden you've got 30 friends around you.
One of my favorite moments was seeing all the kids playing with the new balls.
You just saw the immediate impact that a ball has.
And that is a good present for our Muslim mother prayer.
One thing led to another and then the idea got thrown out of the table of doing a tournament.
The play well tournament, it's a tournament for all the kids.
12 teams were made, then the competition started last year.
The tournament like this kind for this level is the first in Muslim mother prayer.
The goal is to give each kid a soccer ball who participates and then a brand new kit.
And then we started thinking, well maybe we can leverage this, thinking about the hierarchy
of needs.
The idea of installing a new well surfaced, and then all of a sudden we're off to the
races.
I like good soccer, today we are going to see the final.
And people are coming to enjoy seeing their children, their brothers, their nephew playing,
and that is a real enjoyment for the people.
You could see the passion in every one of those kids eyes.
If the other guy has cleats on and you don't have cleats on, so a lot of things that I've
never seen before.
There's a lot of action, a lot of physicality.
They were just going out, giving it their all.
Even in my life I've never seen things like this.
My hope is that they come one step closer to their dream they have.
Who knows, one day we have one kid from Muslim mother prayer playing professional soccer.
Who knows.
Yeah.
