Imani Football- Continuing to Change Lives

As many of you know, I help coach football at Imani -- a small, private intercity school in Pittsburgh’s East Hills. For me, what I do as a coach at Imani marries my desire to help intercity kids break out of the problems they face on a daily basis with my passion for sports. It has been a perfect and rewarding marriage for me, allowing me to touch and change the lives of our players. Imani and the Imani football team are central to my life’s work. I invite you to join me in that work.

Imani football is an urban version of Hoosiers – we typically dress between 16-20 kids in grades 9 through 12. That is right, we play on Friday nights with 16-20 kids (on one occasion we dressed 13 because of injuries and won!). Last year, because of injuries, we played 2 games with only 11 players in uniform.

To our children, football is more than a sport or activity. Our students live in some of Pittsburgh’s most dangerous neighborhoods and many come from single parent homes. Well over 90% of Imani’s students live below the poverty line. To those talented enough, football is a possible path to college and out of a life of poverty and an environment that does not always value education. To others, it provides an environment of safety, comradery, and male role models (our coaches) – all of which are unfortunately sometimes lacking in the lives of our players. We use football and education to teach them about life in the hope of helping them breaking out of the cycle of poverty that afflicts their community. We use football to plain and simple, save and change lives.

We are anything but a private school powerhouse flush with funds. We struggle to fund the team every year. We often do not have enough quality individual equipment (helmets that fit correctly, shoulder pads, etc.); practice equipment (blocking sleds, bags, etc.); travel funds; and other needed resources (Hudl account). Our coaches put in upwards of 500 hours per year and we can only afford to pay them a modest stipend of $500-$1000 that in reality amounts to between $1-$2 dollars per hour. They could make a ton more money with a real second job, but they sacrifice for our kids.

Overall, Imani itself is a school with a very tight budget, often needing to work hard to make payroll for our teachers. That school budget of roughly $2.5 million must be raised from scratch on an annual basis. With that in mind, there is a move to have Imani athletic teams self-fund because the school’s budget cannot support the teams. For us, that can’t be done with player/family contributions – those funds simply do not exist.

That is why I am inviting you to this fundraiser. My goal is to try and raise $35,000 through friends and family that understand how important athletics is in developing young men and women, particularly the young men that play Imani football. These funds will allow us to pay our coaches a legitimate stipend of between $2500-$4000 each and will cover all our game day costs for both home games (it cost us $1800 to host a game) and away games (which cost about $900 for us to attend).

Please share this with anyone you think would be interested in learning more.