Every year, the sports world spends one week telling itself a story about greatness. Championship week brings the cameras, the countdown clocks, the parties that spill into every corner of a host city. This year, that city was the Bay Area. And while most of the attention stayed on the stadium, we were a few miles away in East Oakland, finishing a project that will outlast every headline from that week: a permanent, full-size turf soccer field at Burckhalter Elementary School.
Before this year, Burckhalter didn’t have one. Not a real one, not a safe one, not one built to hold up under daily use by hundreds of kids. Now it does.
Why Burckhalter, why now
The field came together through our partnership with NFL executive Troy Vincent Sr. and Tommi A. Vincent, whose Vincent Country Safe Zone Activity Day has brought Super Bowl week resources directly to under-resourced school communities for nine years running. This year’s event, held February 3 and themed “Dreams Grow Here,” brought more than 200 Pre-K through fifth-grade students out onto a campus that, for one day, looked and felt entirely different.
Our part in that day was the ground itself: a first-ever full-size Pivot Performance Turf soccer field, installed alongside an adaptive agility mat designed so that every learner, including students with mobility or sensory needs, has a way to move and play. No crumb rubber infill. No added PFAS. A surface built to hold up to daily play without turning into a long-term maintenance burden for a school that has other priorities to fund. All in, it’s an investment of nearly $300,000 in infrastructure that didn’t exist on this campus before this year.
As our President, Dr. Mimi Nartey, put it: “Every child deserves a safe place to move, play, and simply be a kid. By bringing the first-ever full-size turf soccer field to Burckhalter Elementary School, and by providing inclusive movement resources that support all learners, we are investing in a play space that advances public health, student confidence, and daily joy.”
We want to be precise about what we mean by “our part.” Vincent Country Safe Zone Activity Day is bigger than any one organization, and Burckhalter’s transformation that day involved a full roster of partners working alongside us: health screenings, mental health resources for teachers, a fully stocked food pantry, and programming that reached well beyond the field we built. We’re proud to have been one piece of a day that, over nine years, has now mobilized nearly $745,000 in resources toward this single school community. Our piece was the ground under their feet, built to last.
A national mission, not a hometown project
Playing for Keeps is a national organization. Our team happens to be based in Los Angeles, but the gap in play access we exist to close doesn’t stop at any city line, and neither do we. Burckhalter is proof of that: it’s the first field we’ve delivered outside our home state, and over the next year, we’re planning additional school-based infrastructure projects in communities across the country where safe, permanent places to play are still the exception rather than the rule.
None of this happens without funding, which is why we’re using this moment to point toward what’s next: our first annual Awards and Fundraising Dinner, on December 3rd in Atlanta. Choosing a city on the other side of the country for our first national gathering isn’t an accident; it’s where we’re headed. It’s where we’ll bring together the athletes, partners, and supporters who make projects like Burckhalter possible, and where we’ll fund the next round of fields.
A single field was never the point. The point is a future in which a child’s zip code has nothing to do with whether they have a safe place to play. Burckhalter is one data point in that direction. We plan to keep adding more.
This project was also covered by Los Angeles Magazine (read their coverage). Want to help fund the next field? Join us at our Awards and Fundraising Dinner, December 3rd at the Atlanta Airport Marriott Gateway. Learn more and get tickets.
