NEW LONDON - Mystic resident Emily Hamilton, 14, started playing soccer with the Stonington Como's program, said her mother Janet Hamilton.

"She was four years old, and back then it was the only program that took children that young," said Janet. Fast forward a decade, and Emily, now a freshman at The Williams School, is still playing soccer, now on the varsity school team as well as on an elite travel team out of New Haven. But for Emily, soccer represents more than a game.

"I realized in 2003 when I met Mia Hamm and Kristen Lilly at a Pfizer event about bone marrow donors that soccer was a powerful way to promote social awareness. I love playing soccer and I believe that helping people less fortunate is very important, so I got involved with Soccer without Borders," said Emily.

To that end, Emily invited speaker Daniela Molina, the organization's Granada, Nicaragua coordinator to speak to Williams students about the group's beginnings and current projects under way in Nicaragua.

Molina, a Colombian native, said she and fellow Lehigh graduate Ben Gucciardi were shooting the breeze one day when he asked her opinion about a somewhat hare-brained scheme.

"Ben said he wanted to drive his motorcycle from his hometown in California with a bag of soccer balls strapped on the back, down through Central and South America, all the way to Patagonia. He said he wanted to play soccer with groups of kids along the way," said Molina.

She told him, in effect, that it wasn't a great time to be driving through some South American countries, but she liked the mission: to use soccer as a tool to develop youths and youth

leadership.

"What's different about our group is we work with marginalized people, which isn't necessarily the same as underprivileged people. Refugees, orphans and especially girls in many countries simply don't have access to opportunities that we have," said Molina.

In Oakland, Calif., where an Under-16 girls team and Under-18 boys team have begun, most of the players are refugees from countries such as Uzbekistan and Morocco.

"Some of these kids have never had running water, and some have never seen a grocery store," said Molina.

"You don't have to speak the same language, because once you get on the field you're speaking the same language and that's soccer," she said.

In Nicaragua, the program that Molina coordinates is in its third year of operation. Molina said the group now has a Youth Center that keeps the door open for girls between 8 and 18 to join in supervised activities as well as leadership training using the sport of soccer.

"I come from a culture where girls are looked down on. It's hard to succeed in the area of sports for women as well as in my chosen career," she said. But if all goes well, Molina will put the Granada program on solid footing and shift her efforts to Bolivia next year.

Molina, a field engineer for Turner Construction, got her engineering degree at Lehigh University.

While earning her degree, Molina played Division I college soccer, was named to the All- Patriot League and voted team MVP, and, in her senior year, was named to Colombia's National soccer team that competed in the 2006 World Cup qualifiers.

Through donations, school sales of T-shirts, scarves and bracelets, Emily Hamilton hopes to raise about $750 to sponsor a Soccer Without Borders team in South America.

Click here for more information about the group.