At the soccer fields of Oakland International High School in late May, players excitedly spilled onto the pitch for the last game of the season.
“Sometimes, I get super nervous before a game,” said Sharon, a 15-year-old player for a high school team in East Oakland.
“Leave the negative aside, give the best of yourself,” the athlete, an immigrant from El Salvador, said to herself before each game.
Mildred, her teammate, said she admires Sharon’s improvement over the last year. At one point, she said, Sharon didn’t know how to kick a ball.
“But I would tell her to have confidence and to not stop,” said Mildred, 17, originally from Honduras.
The girls have come a long way: last season, their team didn’t make the playoffs. This spring, as the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off in the Bay Area, the girls set out to win third place.
More importantly, the teams play for community — “their sense of belonging,” said Alexis Catt, who coaches the East Oakland high school team as part of a national nonprofit Soccer Without Borders.
The Bay Area location provides critical year-round support to newcomer refugee and immigrant youth across Alameda and San Francisco counties.
The program combines zero-cost access to fields, gear and soccer training with dedicated mental health resources to support underserved youth in the Bay Area. Through a new program called Meet Me on the Pitch and a collaboration with UCSF, coaches aim to provide comprehensive mental health support for the students on and off the field.
“It’s a very holistic approach,” said Natalie Ramos, a program coordinator. On top of coaching, Ramos and other staff act as case managers and provide academic mentorship to their students.
“If they need support in their classes, I can do that. If they’re having trouble communicating with one of their teachers, I can help them with that,” Ramos said.
Ye-Htet Soe, co-director of Soccer Without Borders in the Bay Area, knows firsthand the difference soccer can make in a kid’s life.
He said he remembers his first time playing soccer in a refugee camp between Thailand and Burma. Instead of grass and cleats, the kids played shoeless in the dirt, with a ball wrapped in duct tape.
“We were just so happy,” he said. There were no lines to organize the field, but “it was organized in our heart.”
Years later, Soe said he hopes the program can provide the Bay Area’s youth with the same opportunity to find joy on and off the pitch.
“Soccer Without Borders is all about being part of something larger than you,” Soe said.
Using funding from the National Institute of Health, the Meet Me on the Pitch study will enroll youth aged 14-21 over the next two years to formally explore how soccer can be used as a holistic way to support mental well-being.
The goal is to see whether programs like Soccer Without Borders can markedly improve mental health, academic support-seeking and social belonging among youth who participate.
“This is already based on the DNA of what Soccer Without Borders has been doing for decades, really using soccer as a way to build community, as a way to build confidence,” said Mara Decker, an associate professor at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF, who is leading the study.
Decker said the intervention gives kids the opportunity to reflect on their goals and take advantage of guidance and mentorship to get there.
“I feel like we so rarely in our lives have the time to just pause and think about what we want to do and what are the steps we need to take to get there,” she said.
Catt said she’s gotten to see her players grow both as individuals and as a team since last season.
“We create it as a developmental process. You don’t have to be good, you don’t get left behind,” Catt continued. “We have kids who have never played before with kids who are on their youth national team in their own country, playing on the same team and both excelling together.”
For Mildred, the program provided a place to land when she moved to the U.S. last year to reunite with her family. On her first day of classes at a high school in East Oakland, she asked around about soccer teams. By her second, she was already playing.
“It makes me feel free because I feel like [on the field] I can forget about my problems and make more friends,” she said.
Sharon’s entry into the sport was less immediate. She’d been in the U.S. for three years before Mildred finally convinced her to join the team. But now she’s hooked.
“It feels like a family. I feel really good when I play; I feel confident,” she said.
She struggled with being away from El Salvador when her grandfather passed away, but she said playing soccer helped her deal with it.
“I would come to practice, and it would make me feel good. I know he would feel good watching me play,” she said.
Together, the teammates ended the game with a hard-fought victory and a well-deserved third-place title. Catt said the biggest win comes from giving the players a place to grow and develop through the sport.
“If they are coming from somewhere that doesn’t speak the same language, it’s hard to feel a part of something,” she said. “And I think it’s a pretty common theme with soccer — people say it’s the same in every language.”
This project was produced jointly by KQED and the CatchLight Mental Health Visual Desk initiative.
Ximena Natera contributed to this report.
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