By Amy White
The Texas Catholic
Between the four of them, longtime friends Scarlett Schwegmann, Georgia Slovacek, Sarah Keyes, and Abigail Bussey have played soccer, basketball, cross country, track and field, golf, cheerleading, and volleyball; and whether stepping onto the court or the course or the field or the track, each knows the thrill of donning a team uniform, lacing on a pair of shoes, and beginning a beloved sport.
That shared love of athletics solidified into a shared mission when the friends noticed a problem within their community: Some children could not play sports — not because of a lack of desire or talent but simply because they did not have the proper footgear to participate. The friends decided to do something about it.
“We founded Project Starting Line in August 2024 during our freshman year,” shared Schwegmann, who along with the other Project Starting Line founders is currently a junior at Bishop Dunne Catholic School. “We just thought it was very important for people in our communities and important for us to have the proper equipment to start sports.”
Through Project Starting Line, the friends collect, restore, and donate hundreds of pairs of athletic shoes to Title I schools and charitable organizations across Dallas, so that local students have the opportunity to play sports, regardless of economic status.
“We came up with ‘Project Starting Line,’ because we really like the idea that every kid deserves a chance and the opportunity,” Bussey said. “It’s all about getting those kids to that point of being able to start the sports.”
A team effort
Since the four Bishop Dunne students began Project Starting Line two years ago, they have collected over 900 pairs of athletic shoes, mostly through what they call their “porch pickup” events.
“Every semester for our school, we do a porch pickup,” Slovacek said. Members of the community with gently used athletic shoes to donate simply place their donations outside their door to be collected at a pre-arranged time, she explained. “We’ll come around and pick them up right off their porch, so it’s super easy for them, and we collect so many shoes doing that.”
Once gathered, the shoes pile high in Schwegmann’s garage, where they wait to be restored. Sometimes, the four friends work in tandem to clean and repair the shoes. Other times, they invite the community to join in the effort.
“We have hosted shoe cleaning events as opportunities for kids in our school, in our neighborhood to get community service hours,” Keyes said. “We just kind of have tables set up with some good old toothbrushes and soap, and we have some specific shoe soap and magic erasers that we use.”
The volunteers sort through the shoes to look for any flaws, replacing and re-lacing any frayed shoelaces, for example. Then, they scrub and disinfect the footgear, finishing with a shoe cleaner spray, before placing the kicks in boxes, ready to be loaded into a car and donated to students in need.
Around the tables laden with soaps, buckets of water, and scrubbing utensils, students from Bishop Dunne, Bishop Lynch High School, Ursuline Academy of Dallas, and other local schools have all joined in the effort to bring shoes to young athletes.
“We had a lot of volunteers come from a bunch of different schools,” Schwegmann shared, “and I think just helping to run that shoe cleaning event definitely made all of us realize how much this is bringing people together, how much it’s making an impact, and how much we can do when we all come together to help.”
A win for the community
Since beginning Project Starting Line, the four founders have gifted hundreds of gently used shoes to young athletes across Dallas.
“If an elementary school is needing, let’s say, 50 pairs of shoes, we come together, organize the shoes … and then we get two or three boxes, put the shoes in our car, and we all drive to the school together and drop it off for the kids,” Slovacek explained, “and sometimes we get to see the kids’ reactions, and it’s really wholesome.”
During one of the school drop-offs, Bussey recalled, she had a revealing conversation with a woman at the school.
“She was like, ‘You have no idea how much this will help the kids,’” the 16-year-old said. “She did tell us how some of the kids in the community don’t even have a house that they live at … I think that was really just eye-opening.”
Two weeks after a distribution at a west Dallas school, Slovacek and Keyes went to a soccer camp where they saw some of the kids from the school wearing cleats or tennis shoes they had been gifted through Project Starting Line.
“That was kind of like a full circle moment,” Keyes said. “This is really our mission.”
Slovacek agreed.
“When the kids receive the shoes that we give them, that we worked hard to clean, it just shows that all of our work has paid off,” she said. “It just brings joy to my heart.”
As the friends look to the future of Project Starting Line, they share a hope that younger Bishop Dunne students will carry on the mission, so that young athletes in the community can continue to have access to sporting opportunities long after the four founders graduate from Bishop Dunne and leave for college.
“A hallmark of a great Catholic education is looking for ways to serve others in the community, and these Bishop Dunne students are doing exactly that,” Gabe Moreno, president of Bishop Dunne, said of the Project Starting Line founders. “We are so proud of each of these young ladies for displaying the leadership, generosity, and excellence needed to fill a need in the community.”
Cutline for featured image: Project Starting Line founders, from left, Abigail Bussey, Sarah Keyes, Scarlett Schwegmann, and Georgia Slovacek are pictured holding donated shoes on Aug. 4. (AMY WHITE/The Texas Catholic)
