As night falls, a wide expanse of grass transforms into a soccer field in Houston’s Gulfton neighborhood. Coaches and teens pile out of a van in the parking lot, carrying two giant lights used to illuminate the practice space.
The players, assembled from eight different high schools, plop their backpacks down, pull out their cleats and lace up. They’re members of the reVision Football Club, a team that emerged from one nonprofit’s vision — to prevent students from ending up in the juvenile justice system.
Through different iterations and locations, Houston reVision has maintained a singular focus on youth who might otherwise become isolated or disconnected. The organization provides mentorship, connects young people with resources and builds positive peer communities.
Each facet seamlessly comes together on the soccer field. Here, players find coaches who care about their well-being, a sport that requires focus and discipline, and a team that challenges them to be their best.
By covering everything from fees to cleats, reVision removes barriers to participation. Need a ride? Two passenger vans travel throughout Houston to transport players to practice on Thursday and Friday evenings.
“Everything is free,” Patient Kinyinga, 15, explained. That’s why the high school sophomore first joined the team in February 2025. Since then, he has discovered many more benefits.
“I don’t know where I’d be if it weren’t for this team,” Kinyinga said. “They’ve helped me grow mentally and physically. We just come together and have a lot of fun.”
High school freshman Daniel Shyaka, 15, is in his second year with the club.
“Everyone should be able to live in this moment with reVision,” he said, while suiting up on the sidelines. “The opportunity is great here.”
When Shyaka first heard about reVision Football Club from friends, he thought they were exaggerating the welcoming environment, the compassionate coaches, the camaraderie and team chemistry.
“It’s no joke,” he said. “Everything they say is true. It’s just a big, happy family. I love it here.”
Answering a call
Joining the club is competitive, coach Amani Godfrey said. “They’ve got talent. That’s why we get them together.”
Before coming on board this year, Godfrey played on the team. Soccer kept him out of trouble as a teen, and he earned a scholarship to the University of Houston-Victoria through the club. Now Godfrey is on the other side.
“I wanted to give back,” he said.
What are some practical ways that your community could remove barriers to participation for others?
Barely visible at night, a looming high-security fence rises on the field’s periphery. For decades, the property housed a juvenile correctional facility. In 2023, the building turned into the Opportunity Center, a community hub with vocational training and educational opportunities.
Charles Rotramel, reVision’s CEO, explained that the entire block will change into a neighborhood sports park in the future. It isn’t lost on him: the symbolism of removing doors that once locked youth in while carving a much-needed place to play out of the city’s landscape.
“We’re reclaiming the space,” he said.
That has essentially been Rotramel’s driving force for the past three decades. It’s not the first time he’s been on the forefront of changing turf or witnessed how something unexpected like soccer can lead to phenomenal results.
“God works in mysterious ways. That’s how I see it,” Rotramel said. “I’m one to experiment and try things. If it doesn’t work, I won’t do it anymore.”
Rotramel never planned a career advocating for youth in the juvenile justice system. He was studying sociology and English at Rice University when his path shifted because of a criminology class and a serendipitous volunteer opportunity.
Without a car, Rotramel signed up for the closest location on a list of agencies requesting help — the Harris County Juvenile Detention Center. There, he was assigned his first mentee, a 17-year-old, only three years younger than he was.
“He had a very different life, sleeping outside, getting in trouble for breaking into a house,” Rotramel said. “And it was all because he was starving to death and needed some food.”
The experience was so powerful that volunteering at the center became a part of Rotramel’s routine and helping vulnerable youth became the focus of his senior thesis. In the paper, he envisioned a new organization that would help youth through positive peer experiences and adult role models.
The chair of his thesis committee asked if such an organization existed, then dared his student, “Why don’t you start one?”
“That became a calling to me,” Rotramel said. “Those words changed my life.”
Beginning a soccer journey
In 1988, Rotramel founded Youth Advocates, a nonprofit matching volunteer mentors with kids in juvenile detention; it later expanded to gang prevention. His strategy was to meet youth wherever they were, whether that meant sending case managers to prison or starting after-school activities based on teens’ interests.
By 2006, Youth Advocates was operating in a building across from a high school. Students would head over after classes ended, mainly for breakdancing, the nonprofit’s most popular offering.
One evening, a new group of students wandered in carrying a soccer ball and asked if they could play in the parking lot. They ended up returning every day.
Rotramel soon saw the potential in the sport, which was drawing a number of regulars. “I was all in from the beginning, because you just saw these kids come alive,” he said.
How could you identify your community’s unmet needs?
Rotramel convinced the players to register as a team with Houston Youth Soccer Association, the city’s top organization.
“We had no idea how good they were,” Rotramel said. “Were they going to be serious? Were they even going to show up?”
Their commitment was clear, however, from the start of the 2008 season.
“They won all the games,” Rotramel said. “I was blown away.”
He received certification as a coach and stood on the sidelines as the team moved its way to the playoffs and eventually won the state championship.
“That was the beginning of our soccer journey,” he said. “And we were off to a great start.”
Finding faith on the field
Youth Advocates would evolve into reVision because of a simple invitation. The organization had moved to a new location by 2009, across the street from St. Luke’s United Methodist Church Gethsemane. The lead pastor at the time, the Rev. Justin Coleman, offered the church’s fellowship hall as a new practice space for the breakdancers. Later, when the congregation formed a committee to take a deeper look at its mission field, Rotramel was invited to join.
Helping area youth and preventing gang membership emerged as a top priority, and that aligned with Rotramel’s expertise.
In 2011, Rotramel traveled with Coleman and a contingent from the church to Los Angeles to visit Homeboy Industries, the largest gang intervention program in the world. During a daily debrief and prayer, Rotramel decided to put Youth Advocates on pause to focus on forming a faith-based nonprofit.
“I realized God was calling me,” Rotramel said. “It came directly out of prayer.”
Rotramel called his friend Eric Moen for help. The two kindred spirits first met in the 1990s, when Moen was serving as a youth minister at an Episcopal church in Austin. He was impressed with Rotramel from the start.
“He was on the cutting edge,” Moen said. “Charles listens to the kids and follows their lead. That’s how you build community. The activity is just an excuse.”
When Moen later moved to serve at Houston's Trinity Episcopal Church, a more intentional alliance between Rotramel's work and that church developed. The result was a dedicated community night at Trinity, which fed between 60 and 80 youth weekly.
“It was a great expression of what it means to be a partner,” Moen said. “That synergy can create something new and wonderful.”
The experience also proved the possibilities that awaited, if Rotramel could connect with more churches.
“The mission of the faith community is to love and serve,” Moen said. “And that mission aligns with Charles’.”
After Moen became a youth minister at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, his congregation joined with Rotramel, St. Luke’s Gethsemane and the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department to get started. Moen also came up with a name for the organization's next season.
“Everyone has a story. No one’s story is finished,” he said. “We are revising our own stories. For these kids, there’s an opportunity to make a revision. It’s also an opportunity to re-envision their lives.”
Houston reVision officially incorporated in 2012, absorbing Youth Advocates. At that nascent stage, the organization’s exact structure remained uncertain. Still, Moen knew one aspect would never change — that Rotramel would work to empower youth.
“When your vision matches a kid’s potential, you give them wings,” he said. “You prove that there’s no limit.”
Field of dreams
By the time the Rev. David Horton was lead pastor at Gethsemane, reVision’s offices were housed in one of the church's wings. The campus provided space for youth in the juvenile justice system to meet with their parole officers. Church members volunteered as mentors.
The breaking program had also been re-established, but there was no community space to play soccer. Green space was severely limited in the neighborhoods bordering the church campus, Sharpstown and Gulfton.
“It’s just concrete and apartment buildings," Horton said. "There’s no place for people to gather. There’s really nothing to enroll your kids in. There’s just no programming.”
Who could you invite in from outside of your immediate organization to help you consider your work and what you might do differently?
Meanwhile, the pastor saw firsthand the effects of violence in the area with a rise in gang activity in the early 2000s. The church held funerals and memorial services for youth who had been killed, as well as a community vigil after a stabbing at a middle school.
“But a greater problem was the pipeline to prison,” Horton said. “A lot of kids in the area would end up in jail.”
Rotramel thought that an unused lawn behind the church might become a saving grace. For years, the congregation had not determined a use for the lot, despite receiving multiple purchase offers.
“They didn’t know why they were hanging on to it, but they just did,” Rotramel said.
When he proposed a soccer field, Gethsemane jumped on board.
“They built it on faith — you can’t say it any other way,” Rotramel said. “They believed good things would happen if they built it there.”
Aiming for a goal
Rotramel began offering pickup games to sixth through 12th graders at Gethsemane on Sundays. “It was a hit from the beginning,” he said.
Most of the youth had never played on organized teams, but they quickly adapted. In early 2017, Rotramel invited the players inside the church for the first time, saying, “We’re going to form a team, and I want you to be on it.”
The youth were up for the task, and Rotramel created a crash course, teaching them everything he had learned coaching with Youth Advocates. In their first tournament, the team lost the first two matches but won the third.
Fast-forward to 2019, and the reVision team took home the state championship. The club would win state again five more times, and to date, 44 players have received soccer scholarships.
Kristhiam Mercado, 31, earned a soccer scholarship to Ranger College after attending a showcase with the team in its Youth Advocates days, playing together until the team won the US Youth Soccer State Cup in 2014.
“I’m a first-generation college student,” he said. “If it wasn’t for Youth Advocates, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college.”
In 2020, he returned to Houston to become head coach of the reVision Football Club. Now his goal is to point other students toward higher education.
“That’s what we’re trying to do now,” he said. “I lived there, and I know what those kids are going through. There’s everything out there — drugs, committing crime, all of the wrong things. Being with us, being busy, being part of something, it keeps them away from that.”
Church in action
Rotramel is confident that soccer is the most powerful tool in his playbook. “The addition of soccer allowed us to dig deeper with a lot of kids and help them set and achieve goals,” he said.
Playing the sport means identities change.
Where does your faith community have unused space — physical, pastoral or other — that could be of benefit?
“They become soccer players,” he said. “They’re not lost adolescents anymore. They’re members of a soccer team. And that transformation is just incredible.”
Today, there are five soccer teams at reVision: two high school, one middle school, one for girls and one for graduates.
Horton lists the tangible benefits of reVision Football Club.
“Kids have gone to college because of that soccer team. Kids have jobs because of that soccer team. Kids are not in gangs because of that team. Kids did better in school because of that team.”
Horton, who now serves a Methodist church 30 minutes away in Spring, views soccer as a simple yet powerful intervention for social change.
“You run a really good sports program in an area where there are little to no programs for kids; you make it fun, caring and inclusive. And it creates so many downstream effects,” he said.
“It’s the kind of difference that we hope church makes in people’s lives,” he added. “It’s a form of church. It just is.”
Hosting reVision on campus also provided his former Houston congregation with opportunities to serve. They continue to volunteer as mentors for reVision, even though the nonprofit moved its offices last year. Around the same time, Gethsemane repurposed its soccer field for a new building, which will continue to house nonprofits on campus.
Rotramel dreams of finding more faith communities that want to replicate the organization’s work. “I want to find ways to show people and particularly churches that they can do this too,” he said.
Two years ago, reVision Jefferson County took root at First United Methodist Church Beaumont, about 80 miles east of Houston. Rotramel hopes it is the beginning of a trend.
“That’s what we really want to see more of,” Rotramel said. “Every community has a church. This is the work of the church. This is the church in action.”
Where can your church find partnership and focus in making a difference?
Questions to consider
- What are some practical ways that your community could remove barriers to participation for others?
- How could you identify your community’s unmet needs?
- Who could you invite in from outside of your immediate organization to help you consider your work and what you might do differently?
- Where does your faith community have unused space — physical, pastoral or other — that could be of benefit?
- Where can your church find partnership and focus in making a difference?
