Doing it for the kids

Miguel Vilas is a little different from his under-10 premier soccer teammates, but you’d never know that watching him darting all over the pitch.

The 9-year-old has earned a spot on one of the city’s top competitive teams, where he’s among the strongest players, says his coach, Gary Buete of the Baton Rouge Soccer Association.

“He’s as hard a worker as anybody we have,” Buete says. “He’s one of the three or four best players in Baton Rouge in his age group.”

Although quick and agile, Miguel’s body sometimes betrays him—clogging his lungs, causing chronic infection and interfering with digestion and growth. Vilas is one of 30,000 Americans—and 70,000 worldwide—with cystic fibrosis.

His coach didn’t even know it until Vilas father, James, mentioned it one day. “He’s just a regular kid,” Buete says. “That kid is living his life to the fullest.”

That’s why James Vilas, owner of the Baton Rouge Capitals, chose the CF Foundation as his fledgling team’s charity of choice. Vilas estimates he and his family have already helped to raise more than $300,000 for CF research since Miguel’s birth.

Curing the disease won’t make a fortune for a drug company, so charity is crucial. “It’s an ‘orphan disease’ drug,” Vilas says.

Today, many CF patients live well into adulthood thanks to new therapies and medications developed through charity-funded research.

Vilas’s Capitals, which recently wrapped up their inaugural season, hosted a charity fundraiser July 21 by inviting 20 locals to suit up and play against the fit Premier Development Team at Olympia Stadium. Futbol Dream Team was a rag-tag bunch of former soccer players and “could-have-beens” who donated, or found sponsors to donate, more than $5,000 to the CF Foundation.

Your humble author, having grown up playing this most magnificent sport (that’s right, Southern University spokesman and player hater, Ed Pratt, I said magnificent), I joined the Futbol Dream Team for this worthy cause. Defying physics, gravity and good judgment, I trained for much of the summer leading up to the match. And for one beautiful night, surrounded by a group of two-dozen generous souls (and far better soccer players) willing to work hard for a good cause, I got to feel more like a kid than I had in years.

Here’s hoping Miguel and the other kids with CF can share that same joy for many years to come.

For more, visit cff.org. And for a photo gallery and coverage of the Capitals’ charity match, click here.