Executive Summary

The world needs more poet-athletes.

Poet-athletes are people committed to their physical, emotional, and social well-being. They use their voices to express themselves, serve as leaders in their communities, and speak up against injustice. For 30 years, DC SCORES (DCS) has developed thousands of poet-athletes through an after school model that combines soccer, poetry, and service learning. We run free soccer leagues year-round, in the fall poet-athletes also write and perform original poetry, and in the spring they design and execute service projects based on that poetry. They do all this with support from their teammates and coaches, teachers whom we hire from the schools.

Each year, we serve 3,000+ poet-athletes in 60+ Title 1 (high-need) elementary and middle schools throughout DC, and serve predominantly African American and Latinx students, communities for whom spoken word poetry and soccer have strong cultural resonance. DCS can demonstrate true impact on the whole child—our poet-athletes are physically healthier, more confident and engaged, attend school more often, and get higher reading and writing grades than their peers, and we have the data to back it up.

We’ve been embedded in the communities we serve for decades: alumni poet-athletes are now parents, staff, coaches, teachers, principals, funders, and even city councilmembers. Our staff and coaching corps reflect our communities, and our organizational leadership consists of a lifelong educator, a professional poet, and a former professional soccer player. Since our founding, the DC SCORES model has been recognized as a best practice in arts (Mayor’s Arts Award, NEA), physical (President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition), literacy education (Library of Congress), youth coaching (Positive Coaching Alliance; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), and Out-of-School Time (DC Public Schools).

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