How did Onside Soccer start?

The Rwandan footballers who started Onside Soccer!

Onside Soccer was started in 2009 by Paul Harbinson.  Paul was working for Compassion UK, the child sponsorship charity, at the time and had been helping lead a church group to Rwanda allowing sponsors to meet their sponsored children.  While there he met a group of kids playing football outside a church.  The ball they were using was made of plastic bags tied up with string, they had no boots or goalposts and their pitch was a patch of waste ground, yet they played as if it was the FA Cup Final at Wembley.  The idea came to Paul that working with local churches in impoverished areas to set up football training academies as part of the church's outreach would give children the chance to come and play football in a safe environment with proper equipment and proper coaching.  It would also allow a structure to be put in place for long term commitment to the area, to develop educational and mentoring programmes for the children and to reach out to communities that no-one seemed to care about.  Initially things started off very slowly after having the idea but by May 2011 our first project opened in Chennai in India.  Working alongside the Christian Sports Fellowship, the Dr John Joseph Foundation and Christ Church Chennai a summer camp ran for two weeks with local children coming along to receive free coaching, with coaching sessions held thereafter every Saturday morning.  The project in India continues to grow and we are now in the process of opening a new project in Uganda.