The mission of the Anderson Monarchs Girls Soccer Club is to provide high level soccer training and competition and academic support to inner city Philadelphia girls. For 10 years, we have been developing what is thought to be the only travel soccer club in the United States providing opportunities to inner city African American girls. We started out In 1998 with 8 girls at the gym in the Marian Anderson Recreation Center, naming ourselves the Anderson Monarchs in honor of Marian Anderson and after the Kansas City Monarchs, Jackie Robinson’s team before signing with the Dodgers. These girls are the Jackie Robinson of girls’ soccer. Since that first team more than ten years ago, we have evolved into a full scale athletic, mentoring and tutoring organization that has multiple teams competing in the best leagues in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey. For years, we have traveled up and down the East Coast successsfully competing in tournaments and leagues from Virginia to the Canadian border. Our original players are off to college or will be by next year and our current players are on track to follow in their footsteps.

Since 2004 we have been based at Smith Playground, at 24th and Jackson in the Point Breeze section of Philadelphia. Despite many difficulties at Smith Playground, overall the location has led to our growth by giving us a visible place to play in an area where there were few other healthy activities for girls. When we came to Smith Playground four years ago, we had just two teams playing six months of the year in city recreational leagues. We now have 5 travel teams playing year round in the best leagues in four states and a recreational/intramural league with nearly 100 participants. We have become so successful that we’ve been invited to competitions all over the United States and have two invitations to play soccer in West Africa.

Because of their success on the soccer field and in their classrooms, these girls have been featured in various media over the last few years. They were featured on the cover of the Daily News in November 2007 as “The Miracle on 24th Street,” they were the cover story for the July 4, 2007 Philadelphia Weekly entitled "Monarchs Rule", they have been covered by NBC10 and Fox29 News broadcasts and have been written about in various national and international soccer magazines.

From our hard work has come much success on the field, in the classroom, and recently also in the press. Most of our original players have graduated from magnet high schools and are in college. We track the progress of all our participants and work very hard to ensure they are in the best academic setting possible, constantly trying to expose our girls to other academic settings and often obtaining scholarships and other financial aid for the girls. Word of mouth and the positive press has resulted in a steady growth in our program to the point that we cannot continue without more public support. We have never turned away a girl who could not afford to pay our modest costs.

Although we are under the umbrella of a 501c3 organization called the Philadelphia Youth Organization, that organization has no independent funding. While we make it a point to have the girls take personal responsibility for the funding of the organization, none of the girls is able to bear the full cost of the program. Even though the girls work hard at fundraising, over the course of a year they might be able to raise at best about 10% of our costs. We invite the public's support.