Alton students will soon get the chance to study the science of soccer.
Thirty students at Alton Middle School will be the first participants in Cougar KickBots, a program created by Student Athletes Leading Tomorrow, a nonprofit that promotes soccer lessons and other programs for children without ready access to organized sports.
Students will receive on-field soccer instruction led by Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s soccer players and explore basic physics concepts by working with Lego robotics kits.
“We want to break the dichotomy between sports and science, the idea that you’re a sports kid or you’re a science Kid,” said Andreia Dexheimer, a research professor at SIUE’s STEM Center. “The earlier we get kids to just fall in love with science and technology, we believe they're going to be better adults and better members of society, because they will have this appreciation for the scientific process and how all of that works.”
The after-school program is free to participants and will happen on seven Wednesdays beginning this week, at the mini-soccer field SALT built next to the school and opened in 2022.
Cougar KickBots is the first SALT program to thoroughly integrate a STEM component. Sports and science have a close relationship, said Dexheimer, who will lead that part of the program alongside other instructors from SIEU.
“If you're a striker [in soccer], you're thinking about speed versus accuracy all the time. You might not be cautiously thinking about it, but you are thinking about it. If you are a goalkeeper, you're thinking about spatial awareness. You're thinking about angles. You're thinking about momentum. Those are all mathematical and physics principles, and they’re embedded in every sport,” Dexheimer said.
Students will work together to build basic robots that mimic the motion of a foot striking a soccer ball. Trial and error is built into the process, as students work with different angles and velocities and measure the outcomes. Participants will use the Lego kits and Databot data loggers to measure and track the results of their experiments.
Damian Jones, a lawyer and proud soccer dad, founded SALT in 2019. D’Andrienne Jones, Damian’s wife, is also a leader of the organization.
The Joneses’ experience with their son’s soccer lessons and leagues convinced them that youth sports are not accessible to all.
“Youth sports have been somewhat privatized and commoditized,” Damian Jones said, “and that dynamic — while oftentimes producing excellent programming with the best coaches, the best facilities, the best competition — has also created a chasm between the haves and have-nots.”
SALT’s other activities have included soccer summer programs, an instructional clinic for youth soccer coaches and facilitation of US Soccer Foundation’s wellness and nutrition curriculum at Alton’s East and West elementary schools. The organization is now focusing on in-school collaborations in part because it has had difficulty recruiting adult volunteers to search as youth mentors and coaches.
“We wanted to make sure that sport is a birthright for our children in the St Louis metro region and specifically for us in Alton and the Riverbend,” Jones said.
