As Drew Boe flew to Africa yesterday, he may have thought about former Gophers basketball coach Tubby Smith. No one realized when Smith was let go by the University of Minnesota in March of 2013 that his firing would help establish a nonprofit organization now making annual mission trips to Africa.
Boe is executive director of the St. Louis Park-based Managers On A Mission organization. The nonprofit has three groups working right now in Kenya, Liberia and Uganda. Boe is assisted by college sports student managers on the three week assignments that mentor African orphanage children through athletics.
Boe knew Smith after working as a student manager for him during the 2010-2011 season. After Smith was fired by the Gophers, Boe connected with the coach and received a large donation of his apparel and footwear. College and professional coaches have sponsorship deals with companies like Nike that provide them clothing, shoes and caps.
The donation by Smith provided start-up inventory for Managers On A Mission. All the items from Smith led to the Clean Out For A Cause Program, and then to the sale of apparel and footwear to the public on the Authentic Athletic Apparel eBay Store. Smith’s donation set in motion contributions of apparel and footwear that have been ongoing including the largest gift ever received by MOAM—a one-ton donation delivered on seven pallets.
At the Authentic Athletic Website consumers can shop for items from many schools including Duke, Louisville, Minnesota and Notre Dame. Over 15,000 items for sale are listed with hundreds of pounds of new donations arriving every week.
Since the website’s inception in September of 2013, over 12,000 sales have been made to customers. “We’ve been blessed by really being able to utilize an incredible market that exists for affordable sports clothing,” Boe told Sports Headliners.
Sales to the public provide much of the $200,000 budget for MOAM. Boe is paid fulltime but MOAM mostly goes about its work with part-time help and volunteers. The volunteerism is part of the organization’s mission, to reach out to college student managers and encourage them to develop as leaders who help others.
Student managers are young adults who work tirelessly to do a lot of organizational and grunt work for teams including the glamour college sports of football and basketball. Ask appreciative coaches and athletes how much better run their practices, conditioning and game days are because of student managers who seldom receive public recognition and praise.
For the last couple of years groups of student managers have gone to African countries for three weeks at a time. Their flights, lodging and meals are paid for, but they receive no compensation for time and work while in Africa. And before going the student managers must pay their own costs to attend a two-day training session in Florida at the Rafiki Foundation offices. MOAM coordinates its mission with Rafiki orphanages.
Boe and the others work with kids in Africa teaching them the fundamentals of basketball, soccer and volleyball. They also bring and donate sports gear and clothing.
What they also do is touch hearts and improve the lives of kids who have known the roughest of times in their young lives. “One of the students last year had very significant scars all across the top of his head that just looked so bizarre,” Boe said. “His parents (before the youngster came to the orphanage) were not only not taking care of him, but really the intention was for him to die through the cuts that they had placed on him.”
The young man’s name is Williams. Boe remembered Williams’ cheerful personality last week in an email to Sports Headliners. “Williams had a new joke or riddle to share every single day,” Boe wrote. “Always trying to make people laugh!”
Some of the children at the orphanages are very young. Boe recalled a four-year-old girl who had come to an orphanage with her younger brother. The parents died from AIDS and the children had lived without adult care prior to the orphanage.
“Essentially the four-year-old had been the caretaker for the two-year-old for who knows how long,” Boe said.
Getting to know the children and bonding with them makes up for the inconveniences of being in a different culture. After multiple trips to Africa, Boe knows what his American colleagues will usually find as the major adjustment.
“The food can be a challenge,” he said. “That’s definitely the biggest challenge for the time over there…is the adjustment to the food. We’re certainly well fed and there’s no risk of anything being contaminated, or anything like that. It just requires…a different preference in terms of food choices. There’s a lot of rice and beans.”
There can, however, be a contrarian. “It seems like there is always one person that for some reason ends up loving it (the food),” Boe said. “They can’t get enough rice and beans, or can’t get enough eggplant.”
MOAM was founded in 2013 by Boe and two other Gopher student managers, Chris Herkenhoff from football and Ryan Wieland of men’s basketball. The organization is assisted by an advisory council of former Gopher basketball players Roger Arnold, Pat Fitzsimmons and Al Nuness, and ex-student manager John Bell Wilson.
Fitzsimmons e-mailed Sports Headliners urging readers of this column to visit www.authenticathleticapparel.com and make a purchase to help all the activities of MOAM which include college scholarship assistance for student managers and others involved with athletics. “As you check out MOAM’s awesome selections, keep in mind 85 percent of all purchases go to youth scholarships, mission trips and support of the Rafiki orphanages with food, sports equipment and clothing,” he wrote.
Boe, who is currently in Kenya, never set a career goal of helping to start and guide an endeavor like MOAM. He thought his career track might be in a college athletics department working in administration but a mission trip to Rwanda during graduate school began to change his life. He was touched by the joy and peacefulness of the Christians who lived there, and he said the experience further helped define his relationship with Jesus Christ.
Boe grew up in the small southeast Minnesota town of Taopi, population 53. He played football and golf in high school. He attended a Catholic church and while religion was part of his life, including during college years, he looks back and feels like he was just “checking the boxes.”
What the trip to Rwanda prompted was a beginning awareness of how he wanted to help others, while following the Lord. Boe describes what happened to him in Rwanda as a “seed” being planted that ultimately led to MOAM. He and the other two founders of MOAM came to realize there is a void in Africa for sports camps and the need for young men like his student managers to fill it.
They have an opportunity to show African children that it’s not just older adult couples, or females in their 20s and 30s who come to Africa as missionaries—that mentors can be young males in their 20s like those who serve through MOAM. Younger male role models are important, because according to multiple accounts, more than 20 million children live in Africa without fathers present in the home.
“This is something that has been put very heavy on my heart (serving as MOAM’s leader),” Boe said. “I don’t see myself ever leaving Managers On A Mission, or being away from it. …We’ve just been trying to keep up with what the Lord has been doing. It’s pretty cool.”
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