Ashley Hatch: Inspiring change through soccer and community engagement

Congratulations, you are the newest recipient of boots from a pro player. We hope you enjoy these boots and make the most of all the opportunities that come your way. And we know that you have a bright future ahead of you as you dream big and work hard and enjoy. I'm Ashley Hatch, professional soccer player, and this is my day off. Being a part of the sports, the D.C. sports community has been really fun. We have, you know, we got the Nats, we got the Wizards, we got all the sports in the D.C. area. got drafted second overall to the North Carolina Courage where I played my rookie season and then after my rookie season got traded to the Spirit. So I've been here for most of my career getting that first call up and being able to meet players like Carly Lloyd, like Tobin Heath and actually step on the field with them. I think that's when I was like oh wow like this is actually happening like this is a possibility for me. I started Boots From Pros in 2019. What I do is I collect boots that are lightly used or mostly brand new and it just kind of grew from there from giving away one through Instagram so now we give away you know I think actually mentioned like 20 to 30 to 40 pairs at a time and you know we have a little better system now than we used to so okay so this is what a typical boxing looks like so I got my note because these boots are from me box here put in here make it like look like a nice brand new pair because these are brand new haven't been worn Jeff is actually the exacto expert so yeah this is what it looks like and then we'll label it this has helped DC scores kind of keep track of the inventory yeah I used to write them on the sticky notes this is a little bit more efficient when the boxes are all stacked up nicely you can see 1070 is a size 7 and they're black cleats. To this cause it's really important for us to get our youth athletes to engage Trying to figure out the process of finding the right recipients, because obviously we want to give them to youth players who need them, so I've worked pretty closely with DC Scores. So here at DC Scores, we build teams for 3,000 poet athletes across the District of Columbia, engage in poetry, soccer, and service learning programming during the after school time hours. that girls drop out at a higher rate than boys, in particular in the middle school space. So the work we've been doing with The Spirit is really to ensure that girls continue to see themselves as athletes and find opportunity in that identity. The Boots From Pros cleats are something special and they kind of provide that extra push, especially for those girls and those non-binary folks athletes who we see dropping out of sport at a higher rate than boys. If you look at my desk I have stacks and stacks of cleats and so we determined that having a critical mass of inventory at the office makes it most efficient for us to just get the cleats out day in and day out. Soccer is amazing and it brings people together and I think a very different way than other sports do and that's been great to see it's been it's been awesome all ages all different people all different you know backgrounds it brings people together and the reason why I'm so passionate about it is because it's a more like it's more personal and intimate connection and it kind of helps create that relationship between the youth players in our community and kind of lets them know like hey like we care about you we want you to succeed. You know that you can figure it out you can work hard you can overcome you can because you've done it you've done it through sport. To see how far it's come and to be able to give girls and non-binary poet athletes that exposure so early and coaches who have never come before families that that's just so fun and really amazing to see that growth about how everyone's path to get here is different and everyone when they get here their path is different but we can all learn and grow from each other along the way and so that's something that I've really enjoyed is you know we've had with the Spirit we've had a lot of ups and downs but there's been some teammates who I've been through all of those experiences with and so to be able to create those relationships with them and to be able to celebrate the good times and reminisce a little bit on the bad times and where we started and where we're going has been really fun and they're just like memories and lessons that I'll always treasure. The big vision is to have like a Boots From Pros in every NWSL market and kind of just copy and paste it for every community but we're not there yet but eventually I think that would be really cool. We're in my garage. This is where I keep all of my boots from pros inventory but yeah so this is it I had to invest in the shelf because I was just working out of boxes and it was really hard to look through all the boxes and find the right sizes and it took a lot of time smaller to bigger sizes so whenever I get a request I usually am able to find pretty quickly the right size to match it up so just being able to kind of lay out all the cleats and see what I have made the process a little bit more efficient so I I would have like boxes kind of like this with just like piles of cleats in them.