Club Soccer Hosts Cup

The new Harvard Club Soccer team took home the gold at Saturday’s “Kick Out Malaria Cup,” an event aimed at raising money for mosquito nets for villages in Sierra Leone.

The event, organized by the team itself, is a sign of the increased freedom sports teams have as they transform from junior varsity to club-level organizations.

Last year, Harvard’s JV Soccer Team, plagued with low participation rates and dwindling competition, disintegrated and the Harvard Club Soccer team emerged in its place.

“It was really a shame because there are a lot of really good soccer players. There are a lot of guys who want to be out on the field and want to be a part of the team,” said last year’s club team co-president David B. Kopelman ’09 of the old JV program, “and we really did not think the JV program was fitting that bill.”

According to Kopleman, by the end of the JV season, typically only four or five players would participate in the games.

Organized as a club sport, the new team has more freedom than an official, athletic department-sponsored team, according to many of its members. “We play club because we want more playing time, but we also want to be engaged in the wider Harvard Community,” said club Soccer team co-president David M. Sengeh ’10. “We want to give back and be a part of community service.”

The team organized “Kick out Malaria Cup,” sponsored by the Swiss Consulate of Boston and Global Minimum, an international student organization co-founded by Sengeh that operates a malaria project with Sierra Leone by distributing mosquito nets to households.

“Once we had some guys on our team who wanted to go to Sierra Leone to work on the malaria eradication program, we thought why not tie those two together,” Sengeh said. “We have guys on the team who want to go out and help, but who also want to play football. Why not have a tournament for that?”

But without the athletic department’s administrative effort, the responsibility to organize the team is solely on the students.

“It is a double-edged sword because we can do a lot more, but we have to do it all ourselves.” Kopelman said. “We schedule the games, we talk to the refs, we find opponents for ourselves, we played about three times as many games this year, but it was probably about ten times the work.”

While the coordination and scheduling is demanding, co-president Jonathan C. Glapa ’11 said that at tryouts this past fall, around fifty students showed up, creating a highly competitive atmosphere that enabled Harvard Club Soccer to run two teams.

From four players to fifty, the members of Harvard Club Soccer finished second in their NECCSL 2008 North Division and then won the sixteen-team Northeast Collegiate Club Soccer League.