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Leveling the Field
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
By: Chuck Culpepper, New York Times
In spiteful cold on a recent Saturday morning in the Washington Heights neighborhood
of New York City, three 27-year-olds stood outside a hushed school, two of them
lured uptown by the uncommon inner furnace of the third.
"She's pretty contagious," Michael Hoverman said, and he meant Erica Woda, the
former Columbia University soccer captain who waited nervously within earshot
for sixth graders to materialize from the surrounding neighborhood.
It startles no one who has met Woda that she has willed to life the nascent
program Level
the Field, which brings sixth graders from the Washington Heights Expeditionary
Learning School (Wheels) into the mentorship of Columbia athletes. In a single
thought stream, the Columbia associate athletic director Jacqueline Blackett
described Woda as "unflappable" and "tenacious" and "unyielding" and "indomitable"
and "relentless."
Yet as Woda; Julia Nosov, the program's chief operating officer; and Hoverman,
Nosov's newlywed husband, waited to usher middle-school children six subway
stops downtown to meet 20 Columbia basketball players, Woda honed her considerable
fretting skills. She was being taunted in memory by a weather-related mix-up
in November that resulted in only three children turning up for baseball drills.
"This is my most anxious time, just wondering and praying and hoping that the
ones who are supposed to show will show," she said at 10:25. "There's no guarantee
that the kids will come, because it's of their own accord and their own initiative."
A 2004 Columbia graduate who taught at two schools in the Bronx, Woda began
brainstorming Level the Field in May 2008.
To read the rest of this story on Columbia soccer alum Erica Woda, as found
in the New York Times, please click here.
For more info on Woda's organization, Level the Field, click here.
