Upworthy · 1 day ago

Youth Soccer Is Notoriously expensive. at 16, He Started a Mentorship Program for Priced Out families.

At 16, with $300 and a school project, Brando Babini did what most adults wait for permission to do: he looked at an unfair system and quietly decided to fix it. What began with Babini going to parks and "offering to train talented players for free" has grown into Youth 4 Youth FC, a peer-to-peer soccer mentorship program that has now reached over 1,000 players across 12 states, helped athletes earn more than 50 college opportunities, and sent at least one girl to a trial at Chelsea FC. Babini's insight was simple but cutting - that talent alone was never the barrier, money was - and his response was to build something powered not by funding or credentials, but by the lived understanding of someone who had been inside that world. "When you remove some of those barriers," he says, "you start seeing these incredible ripple effects in people's lives." His story is a reminder that proximity to a problem, paired with the willingness to act, can be its own kind of expertise.