Sixth-grade soccer player raises over $700 to provide equipment for poor children in Gambia

Friday, Apr. 22, 2016

SALT LAKE CITY — Zoe Murphy, a sixth-grader at St. Vincent de Paul School in Salt Lake City, collected used soccer gear and more than $700 to send to poor children in Gambia.

Murphy organized the collection during a recent Grandparents’ Day school Mass; she also collected used soccer gear during other school Masses.

The donations will be distributed through the Mansally Foundation, which was started by the former Real Salt Lake player Abdoulie Mansally, who grew up in Gambia in desperate poverty.

“Mansally never had shoes to play soccer when he was young,” Murphy said. “So he collects soccer shoes and equipment for the kids.” 

Murphy, who says she is a “crazy soccer fan” attends almost every Real Salt Lake game. Mansally would sign autographs after the games; once Murphy asked him for his jersey and “he gave it to me,” she said. “I looked online and found his foundation’s website. He does auctions before every home game for his jersey, and I won one of his signed jerseys. I also won a dinner with him, but I am just a kid and I thought that would be weird, so he offered to have a soccer practice with my team.” 

During the soccer practice, the team collected used soccer equipment, cleats and gear bags for the kids in Gambia.

Wanting to further help the Mansally   Foundation, in October Murphy went to Sarah Lambert, St. Vincent de Paul vice principal, to see if the school would contribute to raising more equipment and funds.

“A lot of times students will come to me with ideas like this, and once I ask them to do a little more foot work, they kind of drop the ball, but Zoe was so on fire with helping out the kids in Gambia through Mansally’s foundation that she stuck with it and got the information I needed in order to have him come to one of our Masses,” Lambert said. “We had set it up and two days later Mansally was gone” – he had been traded to the Houston Dynamo team – “but we continued with the fundraiser and collected quite a lot of equipment.”

“Hockey and basketball players won’t give you their jerseys, but soccer players will take their jerseys off and give it to a fan and just walk away,” said Murphy, who now has five player’s jerseys.

Murphy’s father played soccer on a college team in Texas, she said. Her father piqued her interest in soccer when she was 4; he would “try some fancy soccer tricks” on her and she would try to get the ball from him, she said.  When the family moved to Utah, she joined a recreation soccer team and in one season “I scored 20 goals; from there I started playing competitive soccer,” she said.