Tori Ramataboee (SM ‘12) was at a sport management professor’s office hours when she saw a brochure for a study abroad program in South Africa on his desk.

The country was scheduled to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and the program would teach students about the economic, community, and policy impacts of such a massive sporting event.

Ramataboee had never played soccer. She’d never even left the United States. But she immediately knew she wanted to have this experience.

Her instincts were spot-on. The opportunity — particularly the week she spent at a summer camp that utilized soccer as a way to teach youth about HIV prevention — would foreshadow her work in the Peace Corps during graduate school and her current job as a senior associate for the U.S. Soccer Foundation’s Soccer for Success Program, which trains volunteers to teach the fundamentals of soccer (as well as crucial social, emotional, and life skills) to kids in underserved areas.

“For me, that’s when the light went off,” Ramataboee says of her study abroad trip. “I was already leaning toward working in youth sports, but the idea of sport as a tool for community and youth development — that felt like such an impactful way of doing it.”

A hybrid SM student

If Ramatabooe had listened to her high school counselor, she may have never had such a meaningful experience. The counselor’s message? The University of Michigan is out of range for you.

Luckily, Ramataboee’s experiences playing sports as a kid had taught her that doubt could be a great motivator, and she became determined to get into U-M.

“If you tell me I can’t do a thing,” she says, “I’m going to work my butt off to do it.”

Ramataboee was accepted into the U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) and initially thought she might pursue sociology or communications with a sports twist. But she changed her mind when a family friend, who’d graduated from the Sport Management Program (SM) at the U-M School of Kinesiology, told her about SM.

“The more he talked about the program, it naturally seemed like a fit for me,” Ramataboee says. “I’d known that coming to a really large campus, I was going to have to find ways to focus in, and SM could do that for me.”

She transferred to Kines and took classes like SM111: “Historical and Sociological Issues in Sport and Fitness” that piqued her curiosity about sport serving as a microcosm for society at large. Serendipitously, she spotted the brochure for the study abroad program.

In South Africa, she stayed with both urban and rural families and learned about the country’s culture and the Zulu language. She worked in the field with several “sport for development” nongovernmental organizations and wrote a research paper about sport and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. 

She attended World Cup matches as well as a fan fest in the coastal city of Durban where thousands of spectators watched the competition on a giant TV screen on the beach.

“I felt like I finally understood what it meant to be a global citizen,” Ramataboee says. “I experienced firsthand that what we go through as individuals and nations may not be entirely unique but can be similar issues or challenges just happening in different contexts. It gave me this new desire to better understand cultures and experiences different from mine and expand the lens in which I thought about the work I wanted to do.”

Back in Ann Arbor, Ramataboee told a friend about how the program had impacted her. He encouraged her to look into a new undergraduate minor through the U-M School of Social Work called “community action and social change,” through which students would apply a social justice lens to these concepts in the classroom but also work in real-world situations to better understand them.

The courses were a good fit. Ramataboee began to think about how to give children, particularly girls, access to sports if the opportunities weren’t available through schools (or if they didn’t make their school teams). As part of the minor, she took a class on gender and sport and ended up working as a Girls on the Run coach and participating in the organization’s 5K race committee.

The ideals Ramataboee was learning informed her work at SoK as well. As president of Kinesiology Student Government her senior year, she organized an MLK Day event featuring new Kines professor Ketra Armstrong, who gave a lecture titled “Activism and the Character of Intelligence…In the Spirit of Sport.”

“I consider myself to have been this unique, hybrid SM student,” Ramataboee says. “SM is the foundation of my learning, but the minor took me on this path of using sport for social and system change.”

Creating a culture of “showing up and playing”

Because of this lens she’d developed, Ramataboee decided to pursue a master’s degree at the U-M School of Social Work with a concentration in “children and youth in families and society.”

She declared as a Peace Corps Master’s International student and spent two years in the middle of graduate school working in Lesotho, a small country in southern Africa.

The first three months were essentially training: learning the culture and the language, how to conduct yourself and get around, and what the work would actually entail.

Ramataboee’s role was to serve as a healthy youth advisor in prevention and education programs for HIV/AIDS and sexual health — fitting given her brief experience with HIV work in South Africa. Her primary job involved assessing what community and youth groups in Lesotho needed in that realm and connecting them with appropriate resources, but she also served as an advisor for after-school youth clubs that used peer education to teach weekly life skills lessons and led resilience training for orphaned and vulnerable high school youth at overnight camps.

One of her most memorable days involved partnering with the local gender and sport office to host a youth day at a large sports facility, where adult teams played. There was a basketball and a handball tournament, and the children were allowed to play with the other available sports equipment as well.

As the mountain Matsepe towered over them, Ramatabooe, beaming, threw a football to a few kids.

“It was really beautiful because it helped create this culture of just showing up and playing,” Ramataboee says. “We had never seen kids using these spaces before.”

By the time she returned to Michigan, Ramataboee had learned how to interact with new cultures and communities and become more confident in her ability to work fluidly in different environments. She applied that new knowledge in different settings: the U-M International Programs in Engineering office, a residential facility for boys in Detroit, a community center in Ann Arbor that distributed food and offered after-school enrichment programs.

After graduating with her MSW, she worked in the front office of the Detroit Tigers in their community relations department in an effort to reincorporate sports in her career. She did organizing for two years in Detroit, mostly developing sports leagues and other initiatives for young professionals that brought them into the city’s iconic play spaces (Belle Isle, Campus Martius Park, etc.)

As Ramataboee continued to learn more about how organizations used sport for social change, she heard about the U.S. Soccer Foundation. Its mission — of providing underserved communities access to innovative play spaces and evidence-based soccer programs that instill hope, foster well-being, and help youth achieve their fullest potential — resonated deeply for her.

She initially applied to a fellowship at the foundation but, before the process progressed, landed an interview for a full-time job there.

“The rest,” she says, “is history.”

Feeling seen and accepted

In the U.S. Soccer Foundation’s Soccer for Success Program, adults over 18 serve as “coach-mentors”: soccer coaches as well as role models who can provide guidance and support to kids on their teams.

Ramatabooe leads the program’s training and curriculum, which teaches coach-mentors-to-be basic soccer skills; the foundations of good nutrition, oral health, and social-emotional growth; and trauma-informed principles and best practices to manage challenging behaviors and situations if they arise.

“Our philosophy is that anyone can be a coach-mentor because the program isn’t really about developing the kids’ skill set in soccer,” Ramataboee says. “It’s about helping them feel like they’re being seen and accepted.”

“We walk the coach-mentors through how to create a team code so every kid feels like this is a safe place where they’re being respected from the very first day of practice,” Ramataboee continues. “You’re learning their names. You’re there 15 minutes before and after practice so you can check on kids. If, say, someone was acting different and you say, ‘Hey, how did school go today? Did you get to go out for recess? Oh, you didn’t. That makes sense — you probably have a lot of energy you need to get out, right?’ If you get to know these kids and know more about their lives and support them, hopefully they’ll come back season after season.”

Part of Ramataboee’s job is to tailor the trainings so they can support the needs and stressors that youth are currently dealing with, like mental health concerns or racial injustice.

“It’s a lot of figuring out what those trends are and incorporating them into the way we train and how we continue to improve our curriculum,” Ramataboee says.

Ramataboee gathers input from the community partners who recruit volunteers to be coach-mentors and tweaks the trainings based on their feedback. Then, once a year, she brings around 100 community leaders to a city where soccer has a stronghold for an updated seven-hour training, and those folks then return to their communities across the United States to conduct in-person local trainings for coach-mentors in a “train the trainer” model.

Although Ramataboee had many jobs that built up her experience before this current role, she can trace many of the skills she uses back to U-M's Sport Management Program.

In her organizational strategy class at Kines, she remembers conducting SWOT — or Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats — analyses, which she still does regularly at the U.S. Soccer Foundation.

Her experience working on qualitative research with SM associate professor Kate Heinze taught her how to conduct interviews with community partners and participants about the skills they felt they were learning and the ones they hadn’t yet grasped.

And SM’s many group projects helped Ramataboee feel comfortable working in teams and with people who were different from her as well as presenting to large groups.

“SM provided me with a very well-rounded understanding of the sports landscape,” Ramataboee says. “So no matter what kind of space I’m in, I can understand how my role fits into the larger picture.”

The beauty of soccer

Ramataboee laughs at the fact that she keeps ending up in soccer-related jobs since she didn’t grow up playing the sport or plan on working in the field. But she’s realized that there’s something special about soccer.

“I remember being at the World Cup fanfest in South Africa, and there were people from across cultures, identities, races, ethnicities, religions, coming together for the same common cause,” she says. “It was such a beautiful celebration of the sport.”

“And that’s why I think I continue to find myself in these spaces and why I work at the U.S. Soccer Foundation,” she says. “We work with folks in Oklahoma who have a huge population of Somali refugees. We’ve got folks in Boston who work with a lot of kids who live in the city. We’ve worked with people in more rural environments, like in Iowa. They all face unique circumstances. But the beautiful game is what brings everyone together.”