Positive Coaching Alliance is proud to announce Boston SCORES as our Partner of the Month

PCA recently met with Chief Development Officer Andy Crossley and Senior Program Manager Allison Pires from Boston SCORES to discuss the groundbreaking approach they are taking to provide Boston’s youth with access to high-quality youth sports and education. They shared the exciting partnership they have with the Salesian Boys and Girls Club to develop a soccer complex and training headquarters, which will allow them to double the amount of programming they offer to the city in years to come and deepen the training and education that coaches and mentors receive.  We also talked about our collaboration in a sports equity landscape analysis for Boston to further promote community collaboration to address systemic barriers to play…

Allison, we’d love to hear more about the Boston SCORES program model. Soccer poetry and civic engagement is a unique combination. 

A Washington, D.C. public school teacher with America Scores was looking for an after-school option for her students and they started with soccer and on days that it rained, she would do poetry with the kids as it was a personal passion of that teacher.

This fusion of poetry and soccer happened in 1994, which was the year the World Cup came to the United States for the first time and dollars were invested  in community organizations and philanthropy. 

Over time, the community service aspect got added to the program and in 1999 Boston became the first city outside of Washington, DC to start an America SCORES program, and we’re the second oldest city in what’s now a national network of affiliates. 

As the World Cup returns to the US in 2026, we’re reviving that part of our history and making sure people understand that sort of outpouring of philanthropy and attention and engagement that comes with having a huge global event in your country and city.

Andy, tell me more about the exciting new Project to significantly expand your footprint and programming.

Our new space is in East Boston, a neighborhood of the city which is very densely populated and doesn’t have a lot of green space. We’ve partnered with an existing Boys and Girls Club that occupies a decommissioned former parochial school campus and through our partnership we’re helping them renovate the interior of the club that they already occupy. That will make space for us to move our offices there and co-locate our non-profit alongside theirs. In addition, we will also be renovating the interior spaces to add some new classrooms with new technology which will allow us to do things like have the coach training institute Allison runs which can operate year round in space that we can control. 

The adjoining soccer park will have a full-sized soccer field lined exclusively for soccer, which will be one of the only ones in the city of Boston that doesn’t have lines for other sports.  There are  two smaller-sided fields next to it, a community garden, an outdoor classroom area, playground, picnic area, and walking track. This will all be space that we share with the Boys and Girls Club , and with a charter school that’s also on the campus, and we will also make the park available for community use.

I think something that PCA really understands is that one of the challenges of coach training is that we’ve been constantly reliant on whatever space we can beg, borrow, or steal from other people for training. Sometimes we’d have indoor space for coaching seminars, but no neighboring space for coaches to get outside on a field and role play and put technique into practice. Other times, we’d gather with coaches on an outdoor field, but had no space to go indoors to use technology, have lunch or if it rained.

There was always some big compromise or trade-off. So we will now have our new headquarters with a training space with all sorts of great modern technology and then we can step right outside the back door, walk across the street, and we’re on the field.  

This project is just a complete game changer in our offerings. We’ve traditionally served 1,500 kids a year in our program. Now we’ll be able to serve upwards of 3,000 kids a year. 

Andy, what is the timing?

We broke ground on the indoor renovations in December and those actually should finish up next month, and we should break ground on the outdoor portion probably later this spring.  It’s a 15 million dollar project and we’ve raised a little bit over 12 million dollars so far. We should be moved into the indoor part later this summer, and the entire project done in about a year. So it’s all coming together!