Alum Helps Youth Score Goals Beyond the Soccer Pitch

Oliver Steinglass (’10) has found a way to combine his love for soccer and art while changing the lives of young people

Oliver works for Design Football Club (Design FC), a non-profit that encourages elementary and middle school students in creative thinking, self-expression, and autobiographical storytelling through design. Led by Oliver and his friends Ayo George and Omri Gal (Omri is also the founder), the program allows students to design their own soccer jerseys.

Design FC began in 2018 as a one-year after-school program in Chester, PA, just outside Philadelphia. Originally seeded by a $10,000 grant from Swarthmore University, Design FC’s popularity has allowed the program to blossom, even when COVID necessitated a pivot to virtual programming. In the four years since Oliver joined the organization, it has finalized its non-profit status and expanded its reach to other cities, with dreams of growing further.

Oliver graduated from Swarthmore in 2020 with a degree in art and psychology and a desire to apply his studies in a fun way that gives back to the community. Getting involved in Design FC felt like the perfect fit, especially when he thinks back to his own elementary school days at Lowell, when he and his best friends, Aaron James (’10) and Drew Platt (’10), would design jerseys and make up teams after school. Now he is helping youth make their own ideas a reality.

After-School Program

Design FC recently completed its fifth year offering a 22-week-long program at its founding site: Stetser Elementary School in Chester. Design FC arrived at the right time for Stetser; the school had not had an art teacher since 2014.

In the program, which currently supports 20 participants at no cost to the student, 4th and 5th graders create individual soccer jerseys, combining artistic creativity and personal expressions of identity. Oliver says that using the jersey as a medium provides space for connection way beyond design.

Over the course of the year, the program’s six coaches cover essential elements of design and the design process and introduce another central pillar of the Design FC curriculum: self-reflection. Questions like, “If you were writing a book, what would the title be?” or “What makes you feel powerful?” inspire students to think deeply about who they are, their aspirations, and the social issues that mean the most to them. As their answers take shape, students learn to express big ideas about identity and community in a visual medium. To complete their projects, students learn to use Adobe Illustrator to digitize their designs before transferring them with vinyl and heat presses to an actual garment.

Oliver has seen the designs go in all sorts of directions. One student, who wanted to be a scientist, laid out a paper jersey template with scientific symbols. Others have expressed nonviolence and anti-police-brutality messages on their templates, inspired by the experiences they witness in their own neighborhoods.

With an established curriculum as their foundation, the program has launched a new junior coach training program for 6th–7th graders fresh out of Stetser, introducing them to leadership roles and bridging a gap between after-school activities available in elementary school and high school. Oliver and his colleagues want to give older students increasing opportunities to work on larger projects and expand their responsibilities.

Academy and High School Expansion

For older students, Design FC offers an in-depth Academy, maintaining a connection with students who graduated from Stetser Elementary and engaging with high schoolers who can benefit from design education.

The first Academy class, begun three years ago with only two students, designed jerseys, but also merchandise and hoodies with the guidance of their coaches. A highlight of the early program was a partnership with video game franchise EA Sports to incorporate the students’ designs for jerseys, an arena, and signage into the virtual world of FIFA (now called EA Sports FC ). These same students also presented their work virtually at the 2022 Urban Soccer Symposium, one of the biggest grassroots soccer conferences in the US, and enjoyed a trip to New York City where they shared their work with designers from Adidas’ S.E.E.D. design school and Kevin Durant’s sports, media, and entertainment company, 35 Ventures.

While the Academy itself has maintained a small class of students, it recently inspired Design FC’s after-school program for ten 7th–12th graders at Chester-area high school STEM Academy at Showalter. Beyond soccer apparel, after-school instructors help students take their design ideas to the next level with the right tools and exposure. “We want to show them there are more opportunities in the world using the skills that they are learning,” says Oliver. “This year, we were able to bring in a Chester-based photographer who ran a couple sessions teaching the kids. That’s also something that we are looking to build on— leveraging the connections we have with Chester creatives to teach our students their areas of expertise and be role models within the community.”

In a recent success story, the founders saw their first Design FC alum go to Widener University in Chester, where he will continue to support the program as a coach.

Design FC Gains National Exposure

At the outset, Oliver recalls the steep learning curve for Design FC’s staff of three (at the time, two were recent college graduates and one was still in school). They had to be nimble. Oliver says, “We wore so many hats: fundraising in the morning, but buying snacks in the afternoon.”

Their hard work started to attract attention. At the invitation of Los Angeles Football Club and Major League Soccer’s (MLS) All-Star Game, staff were flown out to southern California to present a workshop in the LAFC Stadium in July 2021. This presented the unique challenge of condensing a year’s worth of programming into a single day. Oliver says his team used the opportunity to think critically about their work and distill the elements of the curriculum that could be most impactful.

They have since been able to use the abbreviated curriculum in workshops around the country, including a workshop in Minneapolis with MLS, Minnesota United, and the St. Paul Boys and Girls Club; a virtual workshop for Football for the World, which provides free youth soccer programming in Omaha, NE and redistributes donated soccer gear to over 50 countries worldwide; and a session with St. Louis’s public schools and professional soccer team.

Coming Full Circle

Their ongoing partnership with MLS has allowed Design FC to have a presence at the All-Star Game for the past three years. Oliver’s journey came full circle when the game returned to his hometown of DC this past July.

Each year, MLS and the US Soccer Foundation present the host city with a new mini-pitch to benefit the local neighborhood. On the occasion of the 2023 game, Design FC took part in the project, along with DC SCORES—which provides its poet-athletes with access to soccer, poetry, and service-learning—to foster student creativity beyond jerseys at Seaton Elementary school in the Shaw neighborhood. Over four weeks, Design FC engaged with Seaton’s young students, transforming their proven curriculum to help students design jerseys and the walls of the mini-pitch, which will be used as a safe and durable field even in inclement weather.

Oliver’s team led the young artists in depicting visual representations of their school, community, and lines from “Seaton Got That Sauce,” an original poem that won the group first place at the 2022 DC SCORES Westside poetry slam. “At the end of the day, mini-pitch or jersey, they’re still both canvases,” said Oliver. “What is different is that the jersey is individual. It’s representing you and you own it and wear it. Whereas the mini-pitch is more of a communal space, so there’s also the cool collaborative aspect. Students were really excited to have their artwork permanently displayed and take ownership of that space.”

In April, Oliver was also proud to engage with DC’s Open Goal Project, which makes high-level club soccer accessible to underserved communities throughout the district, in one of Design FC’s now-signature day-long workshops. Throughout the three-hour session, coaches took students through the design process and led them to reflect deeply on their individual identities and that of the team. The result was a team jersey featuring international flags, cherry blossoms, and the word “love.”

Students Drive This Alum’s Lifelong Learning

Oliver enjoys working with his students and is inspired by their outlook on life. “It is special to see how children drive the program,” he says. “If the kids want to do something, we will make it happen.” The work ignites the founders’ own passions, allowing the team to pivot through COVID, gain leadership skills, and evolve along the way.

“I’ve learned an incredible amount about working with kids of different ages and from different cities across the US. It’s been very inspiring to hear the stories that kids have to share,” says Oliver. He, Omri, and Ayo are continuing to centralize the curriculum and consolidate the process, preserving their ideas so that Design FC can reach as many students as possible. “The way students share things through their art, I think, is incredibly powerful.”

To learn more about Design FC and their programs, visit DesignFC.org or follow them on Instagram @dfc.afterschool