1. Chula Vista Soccer League
2. Chula Vista Soccer Fundraiser 2008
If you are an elementary school teacher, coach, or administrator looking for a program that will jump-start fund-raising for an activity that involves athletics at your school, you have come to the right place. The product to be sold to raise the funds you need is an award-winning book that will have universal appeal to any young reader. In addition to the monies raised, an ancillary outcome will be the increased literacy and historical perspective of those who complete the book. Please read on for an example of the kind of results you can expect to achieve.
The League Commissioner of the Chula Vista (CA) Elementary School District’s Interscholastic Soccer League, Gerardo Morales of Clear View Elementary, was searching for an innovative way to raise funds for a much needed upgrade to the officiating at his league’s games. In most cases, the volunteer referees (and assistant referees) were parents and/or relatives of the home team’s players. Their performances were, not unexpectedly, biased; either they favored their offspring or over-compensated to avoid charges of nepotism. The Director of Referees, Denis Vargas of Jaurez-Lincoln Elementary, felt that a program that would recruit, train, certify, and compensate high-school age soccer players as impartial game officials would solve the problems. The question was: where would the money come from? Morales and Vargas contacted the author and a program was created whereby all profits from the sales of the books through the schools (including to teachers, students, players, parents and friends etc), as well as the honorariums paid for school assemblies featuring the author, would go towards the officiating program.
The program got started late in the 2008/09 school year. In just a few short months, with assemblies being held in only three out of the forty five schools in the CVESD with soccer teams, over $3,000 was raised for the pilot training program for those interested in learning how to referee a soccer game. In addition to the successful results for the district, a home-grown economic stimulus (paying each official $30/game for working fifteen scheduled events) was instituted in an economically depressed socio-economic area of San Diego County. It was definitely a win-win-win situation for all involved.
If you would like to find out more about using “Soccer’s Story & A Futbol Fable” to help with similar extra-curricular sports-related funding, please contact the author by e-mail at gilsperry@yahoo.com or call him at (619) 887-9288. If you are interested, he will also fill you in on his most recent creation, the “How To Write A Book” assembly program.
