Carrie LeCrom and 8-year-old Liam of the Fire Fighters Football Club in Khayelitsha near Cape Town, South Africa (Photo courtesy VCU Center for Sport Leadership)
Soccer has been called the universal language. Carrie LeCrom, executive director of the Center for Sport Leadership (CSL) at Virginia Commonwealth University, understands firsthand that a person can step onto a soccer field in any part of the world and immediately communicate with other players, even if they don’t share a spoken language, religion or political ideology. For more than a decade, LeCrom has run international coaching programs that teach soccer but also impart skills that can make a difference in the lives of young people —such as leadership, teamwork, time management, and good decision-making in the areas of health, wellness and education.
LeCrom speaks with passion of these initiatives and the people all over the world with whom she has developed working relationships. One of the programs of which she is especially proud is Ubuhle Bendalo, an effort to prevent teen pregnancies in Alexandra, outside of Johannesburg in South Africa. The brainchild of two local women, Busisiwe Papale and Mokgadi Ramatsokotla, this program coaches girls in soccer and netball, a sport derived from basketball, but it’s essentially an empowerment program that provides girls with unconditional support as they commit to avoiding pregnancy in their teenage years. LeCrom assisted the program in South Africa in 2016, and Papale and Ramatsokotla were part of a delegation that visited Richmond in 2015. “This program is definitely having a large and positive impact on the lives of these girls,” LeCrom says.
Children at play in a dirt parking lot. They are members of a Stellenbosch soccer club, Lynedoch United. (Photo courtesy VCU Center for Sport Leadership)
She will again have the opportunity to work in South Africa with teen girls, as LeCrom has been granted a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to create, pilot and assess a soccer coach training program in Stellenbosch, a farming community east of Cape Town. For 11 months, LeCrom will work with girls at risk due to high levels of gender violence, lack of access to education and limited employment opportunities.
“There is a need for job skills training for girls in this community,” LeCrom says, “and so we came up with the idea of teaching teenage girls to be coaches. Through this we will teach them job skills such as communication, time management, dealing with conflict and goal setting. These are all skills that can be transferred to the workplace.”
The teens will then coach elementary-school-aged girls, who are also underserved, and in doing so the program will generate after-school opportunities in an area where these are hard to come by. To create the program, LeCrom will partner with colleagues at Stellenbosch University’s Center for Human Performance Sciences. The university’s Center for Social Impact will help roll out the initiative in the community.
LeCrom says that girls haven’t historically been exposed to soccer coaching in South Africa, although this has started to change in recent years. This is one of the reasons she chose the sport for this effort. “A lot of programs find success when there are no preconceived notions,” LeCrom says. She hopes the girls will be interested enough to try the program, and then she hopes that they will find it empowering to participate in a sport that has traditionally been male-dominated.
Carrie LeCrom and friends at the Pimville Boys & Girls Club located in the township of Soweto (Photo courtesy VCU Center for Sport Leadership)
LeCrom’s experience internationally, though, has taught her the importance of being flexible: “If the girls decide they want to play netball or something else, then we will change.” She says that it’s important to respect a community’s local traditions and ways of doing things and not to go in with fixed ideas.
One of her goals for this project is to involve more people from VCU’s Center for Sports Leadership. “Global-mindedness is a core value at CSL,” says LeCrom. “We try to bring global focus to the classroom every day. If I can bring VCU students to Stellenbosch, it would take this to a whole new level. I’m looking into it, but nothing has been set up at this point.”
She says that sports has become a global industry, which means that for CSL students to be able to succeed, they need to understand cultural differences. In her words, “They need understanding rather than judgment.”
LeCrom is hoping that her experience in South Africa will also show her ways that CSL can have a greater impact in Richmond. “There is a high need for sports development programs in our local community,” she says. “Normally we partner with people in Richmond, but this work in South Africa will help me understand the process of developing programs versus being a partner.”
LeCrom is one of over 800 U.S. citizens who will teach, conduct research and provide expertise abroad during the 2018-19 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. Funded through an annual appropriation made by Congress to the Department of State, the Fulbright program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide, is intended to build lasting connections between the United States and foreign nations. Recipients are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership and service in their fields.
VCU held a tournament for the neighborhood kids at a field in Alexandra, South Africa, installed by FIFA after the 2010 World Cup. (Photo courtesy VCU Center for Sport Leadership)
A native of Northern Virginia, LeCrom moved to Richmond in 2002 to attend graduate school at VCU. She holds degrees from Lynchburg College (a bachelor’s in business administration and sport management) and VCU (a master’s in sport leadership and a Ph.D. in education). A member of the women’s soccer team while at Lynchburg College, she was named a first team Division III All-American and an Academic All-American.
Over the past 10 years, LeCrom has been awarded more than $2 million in grants from the State Department’s Sports Diplomacy Division, and she has operated cultural exchanges and sports programs that have promoted development in the fields of health and wellness and education in Ethiopia, China, South Africa, Kazakhstan, India and Sri Lanka.
A project with South Africa in 2015-16 focused on using sports to promote social change in the areas of health, HIV/AIDS, leadership and teen pregnancy. One of the coaches LeCrom brought to Richmond in 2015 and then worked with in South Africa in 2016, Shaun Claasen of Lynedoch United Football Club in Stellenbosch, says that it was immediately apparent that youth communities mattered greatly to LeCrom.
“I enjoyed her innovative ways of working with the youth,” Claasen says. “And I was able to adopt these methods and use them on a daily basis.” Claasen says they would have themes around which they centered their coaching. For instance, one week they would teach the children about the value of recycling. LeCrom, however, made it extra special because she is, in Claasen’s words, a real people person, and it’s not only a job to her.
Another South African coach LeCrom worked with was Tumi Ramasodi of the Boys and Girls Clubs of South Africa, which is based in Soweto and Johannesburg. “She made me see sport, particularly soccer, as a powerful tool for change,” says Ramasodi, who also notes that LeCrom is known for “amazing patience and her signature smile.”
LeCrom is currently overseeing a multiyear project (2016-2019) in south-central Asia that involves two-way exchanges with young athletes from Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and India. The social issues vary by country. The group from Kazakhstan, for instance, is looking at adaptive sports for people with disabilities, dealing with stigma and how to build a suitable infrastructure for adaptive sports. Since 2004, LeCrom has also coordinated a European model of sport study abroad course for her master’s students each year. This elective course involves a two-week trip to three countries in Western Europe. In each of these countries, the students study different ways of managing sport. The youth academies are always of interest to American students.
LeCrom will be accompanied to South Africa by her husband, Erwan LeCrom, the director of youth development for the Richmond Strikers soccer club, and the couple’s two young children, ages 6 and 7. Erwan will be a volunteer coach during the family’s stay in South Africa.
LeCrom says that the decision to pursue a Fulbright was truly a family decision. “South Africa is a place where both my husband and I feel we can make an impact,” she says, “and we know that our children will grow exponentially through this experience.” She believes that this year abroad will be one that changes her family for the better. “We couldn’t be more excited.”
