April 28, 2016
Since January, the Vanderbilt soccer team has been hard at work on the field, in the classroom and out in the greater Nashville area, amassing over 200 hours of community service.
In the last four months the Commodore squad, as a team, has helped build houses through Habitat for Humanity, taught soccer skills to some of their biggest fans in Sloane’s Sidekicks and sanitized play toys for the patients of the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital.
“My New Year’s resolution was to do service once and week,” said junior Claire Anderson. “After reflecting on my goal I realized I hadn’t been doing as much as I wanted to. As student-athletes we’re in really privileged positions to make a big difference, and we definitely recognized that. So when the coaches brought up community service, it perfectly aligned with what I wanted to do myself. The team activities have been really cool, it was really awesome to go out and work in the community.”
Vandy soccer’s first team-wide serve activity was cleaning toys at the Children’s hospital
Creating additional ties between the soccer team and the Nashville community proved to be while laborious work, easy and fulfilling work, as the team built a house and shed side-by-side with Habitat homeowners, pulling nails from boards, taking down braces, laying cement and literally raising the family’s walls and roof.
“The family was there for the first part of the day, and they were super excited. The grandma of the family was hilarious, and thanked us every five minutes, so you knew what you were doing was really helping someone. We all felt really accomplished looking back at what we were able to do… even the day after, because we were all so sore from hammering and using all these different tools. Most of us hadn’t really worked with power tools, or built a house, so that was really rewarding.”
“The whole department has been really involved with Slone’s Sidekicks, and they basically partner an abled body person with someone who is physically or mentally disabled in whatever spectrum. What we were doing was playing soccer with the kids, but we kind of acted as a buddy.”
“We did a lot of drills with them, we set up passing drills and set up different drills that we could with the abled bodied kids, but it was actually really cool because the disabled kids wouldn’t back down from some of the drills and when we challenged them, all the kids rose to the occasion. We signed their shirts and it was really sweet. I think they had a really great time.”
While the team did several activities together, the student-athletes also but in hours of service on their own including time spent working with the Big Brothers Big Sisters of American organization, YWCA, American Red Cross, Soles for Souls and Nashville Rescue Mission to name a few. While the school year comes to a close, the ‘Dores look forward to continuing their efforts in the Nashville community next season.
