RePlay began with a simple idea: a donation drive for used soccer gear. This was sparked by my love for soccer and my time spent volunteering with a group of kids from an under-resourced community in South Africa in 2019. My time spent with these kids impacted me in unforgettable ways. I was touched by their infectious smiles, kindness, curiosity, and perhaps, most of all, by our shared language for simply playing. 

A year after returning from Africa and once back into my normal soccer routine, I discovered a closet full of forgotten soccer gear. My immediate thought was how I could get this gear to the kids I’d met in South Africa. I also realized I probably wasn’t the only player sitting on unused equipment. With four million youth soccer players in the U.S. alone, there’s a lot of soccer gear piling up in closets. So, I reached out to my teammates, collected over a hundred items, laundered and sorted them, and donated them to the kids in South Africa.

That was the beginning of RePlay. 

What started as a simple one-time donation expanded over the next few years. From 2020-2023, RePlay donated thousands of items of soccer gear to youth in the U.S., South Africa, and Mexico. All this gear was collected from just a few soccer-loving towns in Maine and Massachusetts. These efforts proved to be a win-win-win activity—parents loved cleaning out their family sports bins and closets, young athletes expanded their community awareness and gained leadership skills, and recipients were equipped with valuable gear that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill. 

That’s when I began exploring a bigger opportunity by asking these questions…

• Can we build a program that empowers youth athletes off the field to participate in community action, develop leadership skills, and expand global awareness? 

• Can we design that program to be simple, accessible, and scalable in order to expand into communities across the country, and even across the globe? 

• Could current technology enable us to connect these communities with one another?

In pursuit of answers, I began by formalizing RePlay as an official project of Frontier Studios, created an advisory team, and focused my academic research on global leadership, youth sports systems, and community/adolescent development. After attending the Aspen Institute’s Project Play Conference in 2025, it became evident there was an opportunity for RePlay to find a home in the global youth sports ecosystem.  

In 2025 and 2026, I was awarded grants to work on designing the RePlay model and developing a pilot program. Conversations with stakeholders in the areas of youth sports, leadership development, coaching, and adolescence, alongside collaborations with youth athletes running the pilot program, are helping shape RePlay into a simple, accessible, inclusive, and scalable model. 

Let’s do this. 

Macy Gilroy • Founder