The cheers of aspiring soccer players are not unfamiliar to the men's soccer team. The cheers usually come during games, though.
On Thursday, the noisy adoration was coming from fourth- and fifth-graders at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School, just north of the University on Camp Street. They were supporting their fellow classmates as well as goalies Paul Grandstrand '11 and Jarrod Schlenker '10, midfielder Will Lee '09 and Assistant Coach Ryan Levesque, all attempting to "kick butt" -- tobacco butts, that is -- against tobacco use by kicking soccer balls through a giant collage of tobacco ads targeted at youth.
The event, sponsored and organized by Lifespan Community Health Services and the Miriam Hospital, coincided with the 13th-annual Kick Butts Day, "a nationwide initiative to discourage tobacco use among youth," according to a Miriam Hospital press release.
The players went into fourth-grade classrooms three weeks ago to run three 45-minute tobacco education sessions, focusing on the media and advertising, according to Bonnie Braga, Lifespan's outreach specialist and coordinator of the partnership with MLK Elementary.
"It's amazing how many of these kids have people in their families (who) smoke," Braga said.
Braga and Janis Furlong, a nurse educator at Lifespan, coordinated the program. Both said the Brown soccer players were very effective at communicating the anti-tobacco message.
"The kids are much more receptive to learning from the players," Furlong said. The players "teach them that in sports you can't smoke and be good."
The players saw the same responsiveness from the elementary school students.
"They look up to athletes from a big school nearby that they know," Schlenker said. "It makes the stuff we talk about more down-to-earth. It makes it easier to connect."
After these classes, organizers put up a sheet of paper, blank but for the words "Kick Butt" and about as wide as a soccer goal, outside the classrooms. The students were asked to bring in and tape up clippings of tobacco ads targeted specifically at young people.
On Thursday, the collage was hung up between two posts, and the elementary school students and teachers, as well as Brown soccer players and coaches, had the chance to shoot a ball in hopes of ripping down the poster. Levesque explained the dangers of using tobacco, specifically pointing out the athletic feats that the student athletes are capable of and how they would be impossible if they smoked.
After the tobacco collage was effectively destroyed, the younger students' admiration for the athletes was evident - some demanded pictures and even autographs from the players.
The students who were most involved in making the collage got the first shots and then were partnered with Levesque or one of the players. Students who answered trivia questions about the risks of tobacco correctly received Brown Soccer hats. Most students failed to get the ball high enough, but the two who put a hole through the collage received the biggest ovations.
The team got the final shots and though some players' accuracy was inconsistent, the symbol of tobacco advertising eventually fell.
Lee, the midfielder, called the whole experience "pretty awesome," and Grandstrand, a goalie, added that the team does several events of this kind in and around Providence. The men's soccer team also participates in free clinics and works with a school in Fox Point.
This event has been a staple for the men's soccer team since 2001. "It has become a kind of rite of passage for the fourth graders," Furlong said.
