Cleats for Kids Initiative
CLEATS FOR KIDS PROGRAM:
Cleats for Kids is a Denver Broncos Alumni Association and Charities (DBAA) (DBAC) initiative to ensure that children of all means have the opportunity to experience the wonderful life lessons that football has to offer.
As former professional athletes, we were blessed to play the sport at the highest level, but we all recognize that our earliest years in football were the most formative. That’s where we first learned about teamwork, about commitment, about sacrifice and about doing our best for ourselves and for our teammates.
But these early years are also the time at which young parents—particularly single-family households with multiple children—struggle to pay the high registration and equipment costs required for youth football.
The Cleats for Kids program will help these families by offering FREE cleats to the athletes in the leagues that we support.
Futures, which started with Denver Public Schools in 2008, is a tackle football program for middle school students in both Denver and Aurora Public Schools. Every high school football program in DPS and APS has a corresponding ‘feeder’ middle school Futures program coached by the high school football staff. The Futures program is committed to providing opportunities for participants as an extension of academics in a competitive and wholesome environment, while emphasizing the importance of life skills, team work, character, and work ethic through the bridge from athletics to academics.
Futures Football helps the Denver and Aurora High School football coaches develop strong relationships with their student-athletes before high school. The program, which takes place every spring, is designed to help student athletes improve both athletically and academically through an intense practice and game schedule along with character development education.
Each team, made up of 35 student athletes, also participate in a five-week character development course led by local non-profit Project PAVE. Through innovative intervention and prevention education programming, Project PAVE instructors designed the ‘True Man’ curriculum specifically for middle school football players that focused on team values, healthy relationships, character development, positive conflict resolution and other relevant topics.
Since the program’s inception, DPS, APS, and the Broncos have seen dramatic improvements in the athletic and academic performance of the students participating, including a number of graduates playing football at the collegiate level.
