Weekly Soccer Club Blends The Beautiful Game with Life Skills

February 11, 2026

Jake Pizzitola, an education coordinator at the Mercy Home, appreciates the many facilities and activities available to Mercy Home’s young people. 

After school, the boys in his care spend a lot of time in our learning center,  gymnasium, or just relaxing and interacting with peers in their living spaces. But what Pizzitola was particularly drawn to was an indoor soccer facility, built inside a cavernous, low-slung industrial building that has stood on a corner of Mercy Home’s campus on Chicago’s near West Side for more than a century. The building gave Pizzitola, a devotee of The Beautiful Game, the idea for a new program to get our young people moving and building relationships.  

Pizzitola started a Tuesday soccer club in February of 2024, a regular one-hour game with coworkers and youth. It’s an opportunity for the young people to get their heart rates up and relieve some of their after-school energy.  

“We have a whole lot of kids at Mercy Home who love competition and love being active,” Pizzitola said. “I noticed there were opportunities in program where the kids would have a free hour before dinner and so it was ripe for us to throw in some soccer.” 

Pizzitola has revamped the club for the 2026 season. The skill level of players varies drastically on the field. Some of the younger youth had never touched a soccer ball before they joined the club, while others are committed to play college soccer in the future. But Pizzitola just enjoys seeing incremental improvements from each player every week. 

Every session begins with the same ground rules: no slide tackling, and no disrespecting other youth or coworkers. If someone slide tackles, they receive a yellow card. And if they’re disrespectful, they’re asked to leave and come back the following week. 

“I try to emphasize the behavioral, social, and emotional learning aspects of it,” Pizzitola said. 

Soccer has always been Pizzitola’s favorite sport. The St. Louis native started playing when he was three years old and played club soccer for Lou Fusz Athletic, a prominent youth sports league, as he got older. But playing competitive soccer ended up hindering his passion for soccer. 

“Soccer stopped being about having fun on the field and making beautiful passes with your friends,” Pizzitola said. “It became more about doing cardio, training, riding the bench for a long time and being yelled at when you didn’t make the optimal pass.” 

Pizzitola stopped playing competitive soccer after eighth grade. He didn’t really pick the game up again until he moved to Chicago in 2021. Then, he strapped on his cleats and rekindled his love for the game. 

“I’ve made a lot of my friends through playing pickup soccer,” he said. “There are pickup games that can be played at Mercy Home that I’ve played in so that’s a funny overlap. I’ve gotten so much back into soccer that I’m the one organizing my own team.” 

Since coming to Mercy Home, he’s helped kids find a balance between their academic and athletic lives. As an education resource coordinator, it’s his job to be an asset to the boys and help them thrive in their academic endeavors. He believes that if they are tuned into their academics and athletics, it’s going to make their lives more fulfilling. 

“I want them to dig their teeth into their education and if they’re interested, get involved in athletics,” he said. “I never intend to prioritize athletics over academics because at the end of the day, the whole point of the sport is to educate. It’s about educating you about the hard rules of life. Sometimes you take one on the chin and keep going. 

Mercy Home has a long history of leveraging sports to motivate youth and give them physical outlets that enhance their academic performance. After years of building our education and vocational programs in the early 20th century, the Home established numerous organized sports teams for its young people in the 1920’s and after 1930, participated in many of the Catholic Youth Organization’s famed athletic programs. In more recent times, the Home held a weekly intramural basketball tournament that stressed academics and our youth have completed against similar organizations in organized basketball and volleyball. 

Pizzitola contends that the soccer club teaches participants valuable lessons about working as a team and handling defeat and disappointment  in a healthy, positive way. “The power of sport and being on a team can teach you almost as much as a teacher in a classroom.” Pizzitola said. 

While the young men in the program usually compete in sports with others of their same age, it’s rarer to see youth of different ages at Mercy Home compete with one another the way they do in the soccer club. And that’s another thing that makes club so special. 

“I like to pass to different kids,” Antonio, one of the boys in soccer club, said. “I also like to compete against staff members.”  

Eli, one of the newer members of the club, said that he came because he wanted to kick the ball around.  

“I had a lot of fun,” he said. 

Pizzitola hopes that the club will continue to grow each week, but he also is proud of the ones that continue to show up.  

“My favorite part is seeing each guy improve,” Pizzitola said. “Some of the kids who had the most room for improvement… I’ve seen [them] increase their awareness of how soccer works and that’s really fun because I can see the pride in them in knowing that they played better than they did when it all started.”

Pizzitola loves the opportunities that the club provides to encourage the youth. “Being recognized for playing the right way is something that I sort of missed out on,” he said. “And it goes a long way.”