Teen gives the gift of soccer
Charity ships equipment to youth teams in impoverished nations
The best thing about soccer is that, wherever you happen to be playing the game, there’s a universal language being spoken that has nothing to do with vocabulary or vernacular.
Styles of play reveal distinct dialects and accents, but in the end, after partaking in the globe’s most shared athletic experience, there is one traditional act of respect and friendship that has never required translation.
Four-and-a-half years ago, on a soccer pitch at an international tournament in Italy, Lucas Wagorn and the rest of his North Vancouver youth team excitedly approached a team of same-aged Brazilian boys from a club in Sao Paulo to engage in the time-honoured tradition of exchanging jerseys after the game.
“But when we approached them, they told us they couldn’t trade their jerseys with us because the ones they were wearing were the only ones they had,” says Wagorn, now 17 and a senior at St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary, who soon discovered the rival team’s hailed from an impoverished area of South America’s largest city.
“So we talked to our coaches, and as a gift, we offered them our practice jerseys, which had our team logo on them.”
As he returned to his regular routine on the North Shore in the summer of 2012, months away from the start of his high school life at St. Thomas Aquinas, Wagorn couldn’t forget what he had experienced on that soccer pitch on the other side of the world.
Difference Makers is our annual late-December holiday series dedicated to telling the stories of B.C. high school student athletes who, through their charitable actions, go beyond the call of duty to make positive change in our communities.
As the title suggests, Wagorn himself began to wonder if the efforts of one person, a kid just entering his teenage years, could in fact make a difference in the lives of underprivileged children sharing the same passion he holds for the beautiful game.
Gearing up the globe
Each fall, a high school replenishes the loss of its senior class with the promising potential of Grade 9s.
In most cases, it takes a year or two for those individuals who will most impact campus life to reveal themselves in their new community.
But Loui Salituro, a St. Thomas Aquinas teacher and soccer coach, remembers turning on the evening news back in September 2012 to see one of those freshmen as the subject of a feature story.
“Lucas stood out when he came into our school with his athletic talent,” says Salituro.
“But I was taken aback to see that one of our new students was being recognized because he had just started a charity. I thought, ‘We’re going to have him at our school for five years,’ and he really must be something special.”
Born out of his experience playing soccer in Europe, Wagorn hatched the simple idea of helping an impoverished soccer club with a charity he named Football for Brazil.
The best part, however, is that the charity has grown to embrace nations the world over.
“The whole experience over in Italy just got me so curious,” says Wagorn, “and at the same time, it made me realize how fortunate I am. So when I got back, I sent emails to my old teams and to others, asking if they had old soccer gear that I could gather and send over. I got almost a couple of hundred pounds of gear.”
A segment on the evening Global News broadcast helped open even more eyes.
Each year since the inception of Football for Brazil, Wagorn has targeted a different country, identifying at-risk school soccer programs that his charity can help sustain through donations of equipment.
After the club in Sao Paulo, the second shipment went to a Catholic elementary school and a technical college in Accra, the capital city of the West African nation of Ghana.
Wagorn was later able to connect with a medical team headed to Southeast Asia, allowing him to save shipping costs on a soccer care package he was sending to Vietnam.
Last year, fellow St. Thomas Aquinas students each parcelled segments of his latest care package in their own luggage and delivered more soccer gear as part of the school’s humanitarian mission to the Philippines.
Now his efforts are geared toward collecting for another shipment, this time to Cambodia.
“I found a company over there that’s rebuilding a huge area in that country for young teams to go and live. They’re even building a soccer field there,” Wagorn says.
“There is so much danger there with youth kidnapping and child soldiers. They’ve asked me to send gear because many of them have never seen a soccer ball. They play with a bunch of socks just tied together.”
Heartfelt outreach
While his charity has reached so many parts of the world, Wagorn himself has never seen the results of his efforts first-hand.
“I was trying to figure out if the Cambodia trip might work, but I’m going to have exams when the next shipment goes out,” he says. “But one of these years, I do want to go. I want to see in real life how happy they are. I’ve heard it’s eye-opening.”
Yet, Wagorn has gotten a good idea of the impact he’s been able to make through photos sent to him from the various nations where his care packages have arrived.
“Honestly, it’s why I keep doing it,” he says of seeing the smiling faces.
“After weeks and months of collecting, packing and then getting all of the money together for the shipping, they’ll send me a few pictures. It’s the most satisfying thing, to see those players wearing matching jerseys. And a lot of them say, ‘North Vancouver’ on them.” Imagine that. Wagorn has been consistently overwhelmed by the response he has gotten for donations, and he says the sense of caring from both the North and West Vancouver soccer communities has exceeded anything he could have imagined.
“It’s come from all over the Lower Mainland,” he says. “Even Coquitlam and Vancouver Island. Some of it is barely used, and sometimes it’s new stuff, with the tags still on.”
Through each collection cycle, in fact, the generosity has been enough that St. Thomas Aquinas has allowed Wagorn to store the soccer gear at a neighbouring convent.
“What Lucas is doing is what our school stands for,” St. Thomas Aquinas principal John Campbell says.
“We try to embody a sense of service, of people giving back to their community and this is something that goes right to the front of the line.
“And he started this when he was only in Grade 8. Lucas recognized from such a young age that there are people who are less fortunate and that we have to try to narrow the gap.”
Adds Salituro: “Our motto is not just preaching your faith, but living your faith. Lucas is on the ground doing it, and he’s not just paying lip service. He’s making things happen.”
Lucas Wagorn may only have been 12 at the time, but thank goodness he was 9,000 kilometres away on the other side of the world back in the summer of 2012, ready to give the shirt off his back.
That day, through a chance encounter, he was able to understand a universal language and decided that in response, he’d speak from the heart.