Brian Enge – CEO Surf Cup Sports
Surf Soccer has been around for over 30 years. We’re based here in San Diego, but we are the premier national youth sports brand in soccer. Our mission is to create experiences and opportunities for kids, and we do that here mostly in San Diego with our 1000 kids. But we also do it through our events where we really help kids chase their dreams.
Alan Prohaska – PNC Regional President of San Diego
PNC Bank sponsorship helps the kids here in a couple of ways. One, it is to continue to help fund facilities like this where the kids can come play soccer. Two, it is really through our scholarship program. There are a lot of kids in San Diego that have incredible levels of talent, but they can’t afford to play on a team like surf.
And so a lot of our sponsorship dollars go back into scholarships to give an opportunity for kids who are low to moderate income to play on one of the elite teams in the U.S.
Brian Enge
You have teams from all over the world and specifically from all of the US coming here to compete for the title of Best of the Best. And that also attracts most of the college coaches here in the country. So we have usually about 700 college coaches here at surf looking to fill out their rosters. And then we have about a thousand teams playing over two weekends.
Alan Prohaska
We’re out here today at the Surf Cup and there’s over 60,000 people that attend this tournament over a two-day weekend. And so everyone from the border in Chula Vista to Oceanside who has kids that play soccer, are playing soccer here at Del Mar in Oceanside. These two weekends.
Brian Enge
In the 30-year history of Surf Cup, we’ve actually only allowed three partners to partner with us and be next to our brand. We are incredibly picky about who we have next to our brand because we want to make sure their mission is aligned right. PNC is literally one of the only people we’ve ever allowed to be in here as a sponsor because we know how committed they truly are to the community and how committed they truly are to kids.
Alan Prohaska
We just felt like this would be the greatest impact to the community and to youth and to get to be a part of that right, to get to have our sponsorship dollars go into scholarships to help kids that can’t afford to be on a premier club like this is something really special. We picked soccer here in San Diego because it is the most played sport for kids.
You know, and you think about our environment. We’ve got sun, 12 months out of the year. Kids play the sport around the clock. And so we felt like not only do we get this great chance to reach out across the community through the sport but then our money goes to give back to help kids.
Brian Enge
Having a partner like PNC, who is community oriented and cares about the development of youth in the community is amazing because our missions are completely aligned and we’re both driven by helping develop kids and in this case through sport in San Diego.
Alan Prohaska
It’s exciting to be a part of surf soccer for PNC Bank, but this is not the end for us. It’s just the beginning. We continue to look forward to investing back into youth, arts, and especially the military here. I mean, San Diego is a military town and we are giant supporters of the men and women that fight for our freedom.
