Shoe drive gains traction

INDIANAPOLIS | Last year, IUPUI’s Ron Hunter was the only basketball coach to go barefoot on the sideline during an effort to collect shoes for needy children around the world.

This year, hundreds of foot soldiers have joined the cause.

Samaritan’s Feet, the Charlotte, N.C.-based nonprofit organization that distributes the shoes, said more than 300 youth, high school and college coaches have pledged to coach one game barefoot and collect shoes around Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 19.

Butler’s Brad Stevens, South Dakota State’s Scott Nagy, University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Matt Brown, Indiana State’s Kevin McKenna and Detroit’s Ray McCallum are among the Division I coaches who will go shoeless, the organization said.

“I truly appreciate that, and I wish I could thank every one of them,” said Hunter, who will go shoeless Jan. 17 against Centenary. “So many have called. I’m very pleased that they are willing to help.”

Hunter coaches at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, a partnership between Indiana and Purdue Universities.

Samaritan’s Feet called him last season to ask him to go barefoot for one game to help collect 40,000 pairs of shoes. By tipoff of that January home game against Oakland (Mich.) the tally stood at 140,000 pairs.

This year, the overall goal of Samaritan’s Feet is to collect 1 million pairs.

“There are hundreds of shoe drives going on across the country,” Samaritan’s Feet spokesman Todd Melloh said. “We’ll take what we can get. Every shoe we raise makes some difference in the U.S. or elsewhere.”

The mission hit home for Hunter in July when he delivered some of the shoes he helped collect to children in Peru.

“When I left Peru, I knew that I had to continue to do this,” he said. “The tears on the kids’ faces that I saw that we couldn’t help were enough to say that I will do this for the rest of my lifetime.”

Hunter said he won’t mind the discomfort of going shoeless for a few hours because many of the people in other nations use shoes as their primary mode of transportation.

“The children that have to go barefoot every day don’t prepare for it,” he said. “It’s a part of life.”

Nagy said it was easy to agree to go barefoot for South Dakota State’s Jan. 23 home game against North Dakota State because his adopted daughter, 5-year-old Naika, is from Haiti. He visited her village three years ago before the adoption became official.

“I’ve seen from personal experience what many of those kids are going through,” he said.

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