A coach in Costa Rica

When junior midfielder Sarah Peteraf practices with the women's soccer team, it is on a spacious grass field with the finest equipment. When she taught soccer this summer, it was on small concrete surface, cracked and littered with trash and broken glass. But while the circumstances were different, the passion for soccer was the same.

Peteraf spent this summer in Linda Vista, Costa Rica, a small town outside of San Jose. Working through Pura Vida Partners — a Seattle-based coffee producer whose profits support farmers in Central America — Peteraf started a girls' soccer program to accompany a boys' program already in place.

Peteraf found Pura Vida while looking for soccer-teaching opportunities on Google, and a few emails later the program was planned out. The New Hampshire-native began learning Spanish her freshman year at Princeton and was looking for an opportunity to improve her language skills.

While the vast majority of San Jose's suburbs have adequate living conditions, Linda Vista is a shantytown. Many of its residents live below the poverty level, and it is situated above a garbage dump that carries a constant stench throughout the village streets.

Many of the girls Peteraf taught ate just one meal each day, and living conditions often included concrete floors and curtains to divide rooms.

"There was one time that I went over to a little girl's house," Peteraf said. "The bathroom for the family was just a metal lean-to with a toilet on the ground."

The closest thing to a field was a trash-strewn concrete playing area, a 20-minute walk from town over hilly terrain. More than 30 girls signed up for the new program, but practices could not accommodate more than 10 or 12 at a time.

For practice, Peteraf drew on her experience working at Dartmouth's soccer camp in 2006, as well as the practices she had growing up. To Peteraf, however, developing the girls' skills was not necessarily the most important goal.

"I had them play a lot of games that I played when I was younger," Peteraf said. "I just wanted this to be an opportunity to show that someone cared about them."

The culmination of Peteraf's two-month stay came a week before her departure, when her group of girls played their first game against a team from a middle-class suburb of San Jose. The girls had to borrow uniforms from the boys, and many of the shirts fell below the girls' knees.

The girls' enthusiasm was boundless. They sang and shouted throughout the entire hour-long ride to the match. They were bouncing as they got off the bus. It would be not only the first game for the girls, but the first time many of them had ever played on a grass pitch.

The middle-class girls had new uniforms, shin-guards and cleats, while not a single girl from Linda Vista had the proper footwear. Three of the girls had even forgotten their tennis shoes and had to swap shoes with teammates when subbed in.

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Peteraf's team of younger girls prevailed 5-2, while her older girls fell, 3-0. Though the opponents had played together for much longer, sheer enthusiasm and energy carried the younger girls, ages seven to 11, to victory.

The win lifted the spirits of all the girls so much that they sang and shouted as they returned to Linda Vista, yelling "Linda Vista! Linda Vista! Ganamos! Ganamos!"

"It was exciting to see how many girls were involved with the program and how excited they were," Peteraf said.

Before Peteraf departed from her two-month stay, the girls threw her a surprise party at the local community center, with food prepared by volunteers at the nearby soup kitchen. Many of the girls made cards, while some even gave speeches to express their deep gratitude.

The girls' program will resume in September without Peteraf's leadership, but it will only have once-a-week practices with all of the girls together. While this might not be as ideal as Peteraf's close instruction, she is still proud to have started the program there, and she hopes the momentum she began will carry on in her absence.

Just because she is back stateside does not mean Peteraf's involvement has finished. She has begun a program to collect old shin-guards, clothing, shoes and balls to send to Linda Vista. She has already enlisted members of her high school team for her cause, and she has also received help from other teams.

"I would love to continue in this vein of work, trying to make it more widespread," Peteraf said.

Peteraf's efforts "in the service of all nations" are exemplary to all — perfect proof of the love and enthusiasm engendered by the Beautiful Game.