South Jersey Elite Barons Football Club Commits to Community
Photo courtesy of the South Jersey Elite Barons Football Club
BY NATHALY SUQUINAGUA | For AC JosepH Media
PENNS GROVE — With a strong focus on the Hispanic community, people have come together to support more than 100 families in need across South Jersey.
The South Jersey Elite Barons Football Club (SJEB FC) have teamed up with the Puerto Rican Action Committee (PRAC) to help provide resources and assistance during this time .
Elliot Hernandez, CEO of PRAC of Southern New Jersey and Bill Shute, a retired FBI agent and coach for SJEB FC discussed their program “Adopt a Family” where coach Shute and his daughter Lillian ran an initiative that helped 400 children and 126 families in need during the Christmas season.
The program began seven years ago, when Shute’s daughter came to him wanting to help others. She had overheard a young child asking for gifts, and the mother explaining that she couldn’t afford them. The moment stayed with her, prompting her to ask her father why the child couldn’t have what she wanted.
Now in its seventh year, the program enabled coach Shute and his daughter to assist families in need each holiday season.
“I took our soccer team and tried to teach my daughter the understanding of helping other people,” Shute told Front Runner New Jersey.com. “And so through a local school, we found a family that needed help, and her and her teammates, we collected presents from the team and helped that initial family in the first year.”
Each year, more families were added to the list of those in need. Many were of Latino descent and were identified through Shute’s wife’s work in a local school district.
Shute then rallies the entire soccer club through meetings and emails and assigns different teams to different families and from there the team is able to pick out gifts for the family.
This year alone the club had 21 families and 67 children, and it has grown every year since then. Using local resources such as a high school for drop offs, people drop off the gifts over a period of two days and by the third day, they have families come to the school and give the families the gifts.
“I think that what we saw was just the need for a lot of the basics,” Shute said. “Coats, hats, socks, and underwear. The needs for clothing going into the winter were pretty great, but then also just sort of the need so that a kid can open a gift and have some fun with it.”
In addition to helping the children in time of need, there was aid for the families as well that included appliances, gift cards to local food stores and necessities as well.
“There was one moment where a mom packed the car up, and, you know, we were like, what’s going on? She actually sat in the school parking lot with her hands on her head and crying because she got the gifts and she was able to give these gifts to her kids,” Hernandez said. “Those are the moments that just break your heart.”
Hernandez said opportunities like SJEB FC are rare in many Hispanic communities. The club offers programs beginning with a junior academy that starts at age five and continuing through high school and college, with alumni returning in the summer to train for their college seasons.
“Seeing it in a Hispanic community and knowing it’s available to you — and getting the word out so people understand that if you put in the work, you can be part of this club, where you’ll experience discipline and competition.” Hernandez said.
He added that the organization has built trust within minority communities. Schools help identify families in need and share that information with Shute and his daughter. Community members, in turn, feel comfortable providing the necessary details to ensure families receive support.
In addition to the “Adopt a Family” initiative, during Thanksgiving, Coach Don D’Ambra, the executive director of SJEB FC, began looking for more ways to give players leadership opportunities and stronger roles within the community.
Wanting both boys and girls to get involved, D’Ambra partnered with PRAC as well to launch a Thanksgiving food drive aimed at supporting underserved families identified by the organization.
Hernandez explained that the initial goal may have been to serve about 83 families, but because of the large amount of donated food, they were able to assemble extra bags for additional families identified afterward.
The surplus allowed them to give back even more to the community. Outreach efforts extended to local schools through connections with PRAC, as well as to churches, which helped identify families in need and coordinate distribution.
“I probably like for them to understand that, you know, at our soccer club, we view our role in the community as more than just soccer, that we believe that we have a role in educating these children that goes beyond soccer,” Shute said.
Nathaly Suquinagua is a bilingual journalist and Temple University graduate who reports on community issues across New Jersey and Philadelphia, with a focus on underrepresented voices. Her work spans local news, culture and social impact, and she has contributed to multiple outlets while reporting in both English and Spanish. She can be reached at suquinagua01@gmail.com
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