WITH all the corporate philanthropy taking place in Silicon Valley, allow me to accentuate the ignored yet again. Beginning two years ago, the Soccer Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SSVCF) began staging annual fundraising dinners to help sponsor its numerous projects throughout the valley.
The next dinner takes place on Friday, Sept. 17, 6–9pm, at History Park. Just like the two previous nosh-ups, it will be a celebration of numerous philanthropic endeavors, most of which go completely under the radar of the mainstream press.
Last year’s dinner at the Fairmont featured Quakes owner Lew Wolff as the keynote speaker, unveiling plans of what a new soccer stadium near the airport might look like. This year’s guest speaker is former San Jose Earthquake player, general manager and U.S. Soccer Hall of Famer Johnny Moore. A tad more on him in a second.
SSVCF, first of all, is not really a booster club. It is not technically affiliated with the San Jose Earthquakes. The group is a legit 501(c)3 nonprofit charitable extension of Soccer Silicon Valley, a group of diehard fans—the same fans who essentially took to the streets and helped save the Quakes for one more year before the team split for Houston in 2005.
These same diehards were also instrumental in ensuring that Major League Soccer allowed the Earthquakes’ records and stats to remain intact when the team returned as an expansion franchise. The 2001 and 2003 championships did not move to Houston with the team. They remained here in San Jose, and the current team is officially a continuation of the one that went on hiatus in 2005, keeping its 1996–2005 records and accomplishments. This would probably not have happened without the efforts of this group.
The philanthropic arm, SSVCF, emerged in 2007 and has since become a multilateral force of community-boosting and social work (full disclosure: many on the board are pals of mine). For example, they have partnered with CommUniverCity San Jose to bring at-risk teens to sit in the Quakes supporters’ club section at the games. They have partnered with the Rotary Club of San Jose and Soccer Without Borders to build a youth center in Uganda. When the troops in Iraq said the local kids wanted soccer balls more than anything else, SSVCF raised money to send them soccer balls. They’ve also raised money for autism as well as the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
On the game front, SSVCF helped initiate the Heritage Cup, a competition among current teams that take their names from the franchises their cities held in the old North American Soccer league in the ’70s, i.e., San Jose and Seattle. Next year, Vancouver and Portland will join that competition when those teams enter Major League Soccer.
Finally, along with History San Jose, SSVCF orchestrates the Soccer Legacy Project, a huge collection of artifacts and memorabilia related to the entire history of the sport in San Jose: jerseys, posters, fliers, balls, ticket stubs, trophies, scarves, programs and much more, including many artifacts from the original Earthquakes franchise in the ’70s. The idea is to create a museum-quality display of everything once the stadium is built.
And speaking of the ’70s, Johnny Moore was the first player signed to the original Quakes club in 1974 and became GM a few years later. Thousands of native kids like myself grew up with that franchise, as soccer was the first pro sport the city ever had. At that time, there was no farmer’s-town chorus of yahoos claiming soccer wasn’t “as major” as baseball, like there is now. The presence of that team was also precisely what spawned a youth-soccer explosion throughout the Santa Clara Valley, the popularity of which still thrives today.
When Moore came back into the fold as GM for the Quakes 2002–03, many of us reveled in the history, especially when the team won the title in 2003. He should have some provocative and rocking things to say. I hope. Individual tickets for the dinner are $100; table sponsorships are $1,000.
Soccer Silicon Valley
