Our sports travel programs provide an enriching opportunity to build your team cohesiveness and morale. Some of your players will have one of the best experiences of their lives, attributable to your team, club or organization.
Our Sports Programs Abroad give your players the chance for a wide array of experiences:
- Bonding with teams abroad through international sports
- Bonding with their teammates in a way that only international travel allows
- Adding service learning to your trips so that your players get to support local initiatives and get to know a small community
- Including time to enjoy, relax, and bond at the beach
- Adding optional enrichment activities such as snorkeling, surfing, zip lining, and more.
You can visit the specific website to learn more about each individual program:
- Dominican Republic Baseball Training Opportunities
- Haiti Soccer Camps
- Basketball in the Dominican Republic
- Volleyball in the Dominican Republic
Our sports programs abroad offer the exact qualities that you are looking for in building your team. The travel abroad builds a unique bond. Crossing cultures increases their ability to take the perspective of others and work with those they are different from. The technical playing will increase their skills.
They may also learn a great deal about resilience and grit. Sometimes our soccer teams in Haiti play against kids with no shoes. For basketball, maybe the person you’re covering has only flip flops on. Some of the gear that your players have come to see as necessary are a luxury that children in the developing world will never have.
One family brought their ten-year-old son, who is a travel soccer player, to Haiti. Every day he played with Haitian children with no shoes. The day after he returned from Haiti, he left for a sleepover soccer camp. This child’s feet had grown that summer, and he needed new cleats. When he came home from soccer camp, he went on Amazon Prime and wanted to order cleats that night. Exhausted from two weeks of sleepaway camp, he started crying when he found out he couldn’t get the cleats right away. Then his mother said, “You just played soccer in Haiti against kids with no shoes. How can you throw a tantrum because you’re not getting the shoes you want right now.” His crying stopped immediately.
What does a typical day look like for your team? Teams can start their day with their coach leading them through a morning workout routine followed by breakfast (we can provide an American breakfast, a Dominican breakfast, or a mix throughout the days).
After breakfast we can head to our sporting activities. Baseball teams in the Dominican Republic might head to the baseball academies for tours and games. Soccer teams in Haiti might go to a non-profit foundation with fields for the neighborhood. Basketball teams in the Dominican Republic may play at public courts for a community, and your volleyball team may go to the beach for beach volleyball.
Groups then enjoy a Dominican lunch, then we go back to more sports. Or if you choose the volunteer service option, then your team can volunteer in a local school or at a nonprofit organization working side-by-side with the locals teaching English, painting, or whatever the local needs are at the time.
In the late afternoon, we can include more sports, or a trip to the beach, or optional activities like zip lining or surfing lessons. During the evening after dinner, we have reflections in which we have a local educator facilitate a discussion about what we experienced.
Our 8-day trips often include an excursion so that we can enjoy some of the unique beauty and/or culture of the country.
In all of our trips, we pay fair trade wages. The locals who work with us prioritize our groups, giving us access to the best. Additionally, we pay careful attention to sustainability. Economic sustainability is addressed by staying in locally-owned hotels, eating at locally-owned restaurants, hiring locally-owned transportation companies, and patronizing the local corner stores. If volunteering, we focus on locally-identified needs of educational and environmental sustainability.
We offer far more than sports programs as we have opportunities for language immersion, volunteer work, college social justice tours, and more. In fact, a D1 athlete from Montgomery County, PA called our volunteer trip “The greatest week of my life.” While she was not on a trip for her sports team, the week was powerful due to how she developed new friends, bonded with a young Dominican at summer camp, and saw a part of the world she never really knew existed.