L4G donates $2K to Indiana Southwest Futbol Club

For the past three years, Andres Schroeder has been coaching and training area youth through a special soccer camp, Be Elite Summer Camp, offered by the Indiana Southwest Futbol Club (ISFC).

Schroeder, a social studies teacher at Northeast Dubois Intermediate, loves to share soccer with local kids. He says the camp develops essential soccer skills as well as provides personal formation through the interactions they have together.

For a kid raised on the streets of Colombia, Schroeder points to soccer as his salvation and a direct connection to his father, Augustine Forrero Ramirez. After his mother left the family, he and his siblings became wards of the state because of his father’s work. “My father worked in construction and in Colombia, you go where the construction is,” Andres explained.

They regularly spent time together when his father was home from work. One of the things they all loved to do together was attend soccer matches. “On Sundays, we would spend all day at the matches,” Andres explained. “He would talk to me and my brothers about the ins and outs of the game. He just instilled this passion in us.”

Soccer also taught him discipline, teamwork, and the importance of hard work. Andres wants to instill those same things in the children who attend his camps.

“We work hard and we have fun,” he said. “A lot of people are afraid of hard work, but I try to tell them that working hard is fun.”

He also incorporates fun into those hard parts of training. “We do sprints, but we do them in a fun way,” Andres said. “We incorporate team-building situations and stuff like a slip-and-slide and they don’t realize they are busting their butts.”

He works with Wayne Nealy and four local high school soccer players, Olivia Helming, Emma Small, Kenley Lamont, and his daughter, Audrey Schroeder, to put on the camp.

L4G, Living For God, is a local non-profit that supports a wide range of local needs, including back-to-school supplies, meals, rent assistance and more.

They donated $2,286.96 from the recent L4G Golf Scramble to support scholarships for other local kids to attend the soccer camps offered through ISFC.

According to Jordan Talbert, vice president of the L4G, they chose to support ISFC because of its broad impact on local kids. He explained that compounding the impact of L4G’s fundraising efforts through an organization like ISFC is a great investment in the formation of local kids and the future of the community.

You can learn more about ISFC here.