ST. LOUIS – The University of Missouri-St. Louis athletic department hosted the St. Louis CITY SC Cup at Don Dallas Field on Saturday, June 10. 220 kids from the St. Louis area were invited to play on UMSL's home field.

CITY SC's mission is introducing more people in the St. Louis to the game of soccer. From this vision, CITY Futures came to fruition, offering two different opportunities for the community to get involved: Soccer 101 sessions and Way-to-Play sessions. Both offer a free way to get involved in soccer at young age, regardless of experience in the sport. Everyone who participated in one of these two programs was invited to compete in the CITY Cup.

The CITY Cup gives kids the opportunity to compete and learn with other kids from all over the CITY. Each team had one player from each Satellite location on it. The teams were coached by a CITY Futures coach as well as members from the UMSL men's and women's soccer programs. They taught technical and tactical skills and made sure they had fun.

The CITY Cup's objectives are to increase empathy by learning about other players from different parts of our CITY, the ability to learn from diverse and unique personalities and to understand each other better and value others' skills, abilities and competences.

More than 20 members of the UMSL soccer programs were there to coach and encourage the youngsters that showed up for the three different sessions separated by age group. UMSL head women's soccer coach Maddi Moon and UMSL head men's soccer coach Josh Alderson were there throughout the day offering the kids help and to support the CITY Cup.

CITY SC player Michael Creek came to the field to interact with the kids and many of them took the opportunity to take their picture with him and get an autograph.

"Our players loved getting to work with top level coaches and the opportunity to impact the future of soccer with the youth teams," Moon said. "It was a great experience and is exciting to see the impact City SC has brought to the St. Louis soccer community with not only the professional team, but to the youth level as well."

"We had a wonderful day with our incredible St. Louis youth soccer community," Alderson said. "It was great partnering with CITY SC. We enjoyed meeting and working will of the talented, hard-working, and soccer-crazy youth players. The future is bright for St. Louis soccer."