During his freshman year, men’s soccer midfielder Gabe Hoffman-Johnson ’14 traveled to Sierra Leone armed with only 20 soccer balls. He returned last month with 500 balls, collected through a successful donation campaign.
The sport’s international popularity allowed him to connect with people from different backgrounds, Hoffman-Johnson said.
“As soon as you get the soccer ball out and start kicking it around, the barrier is immediately gone,” he said.
Between the stresses of two-a-days, double headers and league rivalries, Dartmouth athletes also find time to reach out to the Upper Valley community and beyond. Athletic programs, teams and individual athletes takes part in community service projects ranging from local one-on-one mentorship programs to international development projects. While there is no service requirement for student-athletes, most teams choose to participate in service as a team goal.
In the most recent data available from 2011-2012, 220 varsity athletes contributed 12,617 hours of community service.
In 2009, the athletics department collaborated with the Tucker Foundation to establish the Jaeger Civic internship. Each year, the student-athlete intern promotes community service among athletic teams.
Only having time for school and sports, current intern Natalie Flowers ’14 said, is a common misconception. “I was blown away by the amount of community service that was already going on when I took the internship,” said Flowers, a Nordic skier. “It’s awesome to see how motivated people are without needing to be prompted. These teams actually come to me wanting to do all these projects.”
The establishment of Dartmouth Peak Performance in 2011 re-emphasized community service as an important part of athletes’ programs.
Several winter sports teams, entrenched in the nonstop pressure of season competition, are taking on ambitious community service projects in the Upper Valley.
Men’s ice hockey hosts its annual sled hockey event on Monday, an event designed for paraplegics to enjoy a day on the ice playing hockey with the Big Green.
“It’s been a fun and rewarding thing these past couple of years,” defenseman Taylor Boldt ’14 said.
The men’s hockey team also sponsors an annual toy drive in December, where it offers free game admission to attendees who bring a toy for patients at the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
Many teams volunteer with the Children’s Hospital, including many that support the hospital’s annual Hero half marathon. In October 2013, over 200 athletes from 10 different teams participated in various capacities. Co-captain of the women’s cross country team Arianna Vailas ’14 organized and event to raise money for the Faces Forward team, a group from the CHaD craniofacial clinic. The cross country team arranged for speakers like Chris Lear, author of “Running with the Buffaloes,” and local professional runners to come and talk at the event.
“It was a very different application of our sport, and it was really awesome to use it for something outside of competition,” Vailas said.
On the day of the race, members of the cross country team walked with the kids and their parents through a one-mile course, then spent time with patients from the craniofacial unit.
“We really just wanted to make them feel like superstars,” Vailas said.
Basketball and football players assisted in handing out medals and arranging an obstacle course for children.
Many projects the Big Green athletes pursue are geared towards reaching out to children in the local community.
“I’m a middle child in my own family,” men’s basketball captain Tyler Melville ’14 said. “I always looked up to my older brother, so I know the influence that older people, siblings or mentors can have on younger children.”
In addition to individual team programs, the athletic department helps coordinate programs that incorporate multiple teams. Some of the largest programs are Big Green Readers, Thetford Mentors and Athletes United, founded in 2007, which provides free recreation sports programs for Upper Valley kids coached by Dartmouth athletes, which all involve between 30 and 50 athletes.
The ski team works with local children in the fall and spring through Athletes United, alpine skier Mathieu Bertrand ’14 said. “In fall and spring they do practices and activities with kids and give them goals every week. On Sundays, all the groups come together and have a big activity day to talk about the goals that they have set for themselves.”
Another popular service activity among athletes is working with the Upper Valley Haven, a regional non-profit that serves over 10,000 homeless and impoverished people a year by providing various necessities like food, shelter, clothing and education. Both the men’s basketball and women’s squash teams have gone to the Haven this academic year.
Last year, the men’s basketball team built gingerbread houses and played with children at the Haven, Melville said. Some of the children have begun attending the Big Green’s games since the event.
The squash team prepared pasta and chicken stew for Haven residents over interim when players realized they had spare time.
“It’s an activity we do together, outside the courts, that ultimately ends up bringing us closer,” co-captain Kate Nimmo ’14 said. “That’s not our main reason for doing it, clearly, but it is an added benefit.”
Across teams, athletes cited sports’ ability to bring together often vastly different communities. Lacrosse player Gunnar Shaw ’14, on his own initiative, coordinated a trip to rural Nicaragua over the winter interim this yearto build a house for a Nicaraguan family through a partnership with Lacrosse the Nations. The team spent four and a half days building the house and the rest of the 12-day trip teaching local kids about the sport.
Many children the team interacted with had never seen a lacrosse stick before, Shaw said, and the sport gave Dartmouth students a means through which they could communicate with people that did not speak the same language.
Participating in community service offers athletes a chance to reflect on their privilege, Melville said.
“Sometimes you get so zoned in on the game you forget that the world is a lot bigger than yourself,” he said. “You get so caught up in being at Dartmouth that you lose sight of what’s going on outside of the bubble.”
