Coach Renee Jackson Reflects on 28 Years of Impact With DC SCORES

There are few people who have a longer relationship with DC SCORES than Renee Jackson, a Junior SCORES soccer coach at Miner Elementary. “I’ve been a coach for DC SCORES almost as long as DC SCORES been existing,” she says.

Today, Jackson is retired and volunteers a few days a week at Miner, but she first joined DC SCORES as a teacher at West Education Campus (now John Lewis Elementary) in 1996, just two years after the organization was founded by DC SCORES public school teacher Julie Kennedy.

In the almost three decades since, Jackson has coached DC SCORES poet-athletes at three schools: West, Truesdell Elementary, and Miner. After a long career in D.C. public schools, Jackson retired from teaching in 2023, but has no intention of leaving DC SCORES any time soon. 

“Being with the children, seeing the excitement on their faces,” is what keeps her at the program, she says. “I retired from schools, but I have no problem coming back [and] working with DC SCORES.”

“They Do A Lot for Us”

Though Jackson is now one of DC SCORES’ biggest champions, she admits it took her some time to fully understand the power of the nonprofit’s model combining soccer, poetry, and service learning. 

When her colleagues at West approached her to join the DC SCORES coaching team, she initially said no. “‘Soccer is stupid,’ I said,” she recalls with a chuckle. “Who wants to run behind a ball?”

Today, Jackson is a soccer fan; she enjoys watching televised matches at home and attending D.C. United and Washington Spirit games at Audi Field. But it was the investment that DC SCORES makes in the communities it serves that first sold her on the organization. “They give you a bus, they give you uniforms,” she says. “I agreed to do it.”

“They do a lot of things for us,” she says of DC SCORES staff. “I have always been able to talk to anyone on DC SCORES, and they will call you back.”

Space for Joy

“It’s just fun,” says Jackson of what typifies her DC SCORES experience. She recalls comforting a first grader who was upset after a game. “He came up crying to me and said, ‘Miss Jackson…they wouldn’t give me the ball,’” she says. “I looked at him, ‘Who wouldn’t give you the ball?’ ‘The other team!’”

“All I can do is laugh,” she says. “It just makes you happy to see them trying.”

Finding space for joy and laughter is powerful for young people who don’t always experience investment in their communities, says Jackson. 

“They probably thought they was forgotten, but DC SCORES comes in and helps them do everything, anything they need,” she says.

DC SCORES’ commitment to the youth it serves is paying off. Jackson says she has seen generations of young people grow in confidence and build strong relationships through the program.

She recalls one student early in her coaching career who was very quiet; “he wouldn’t say nothing,” she says. She worried that the poet-athlete would struggle with DC SCORES’ poetry curriculum, which culminates in every child in the program performing original poetry on stage at slam. “But I was shocked that, at the end, he was one of the best speakers we had!”

These days, Jackson meets former students and poet-athletes wherever she goes. In one notable encounter, she came across a former West poet-athlete, Aspen McNair, at Coach Kickoff and discovered that he was now a DC SCORES coach at Tubman Elementary!

She says, “I’ve had a lot of them, who have become coaches and have did well in school, come back and told me, ‘Ms. Jackson, I remember you. We used to be on your soccer team!’”

A Zest for Life

Jackson is enjoying retirement — this year alone, she has taken multiple cruises and went on the vacation of a lifetime to Thailand. She is also an active participant in senior programming offered by the District’s Department of Parks and Recreation.

Her zest for life is something Jackson has always strived to pass onto her students, whether through DC SCORES or the school ski trips she organized as a teacher. (“Most children in the District don’t get involved in certain things,” she says. “Soccer is one of them, and skiing is another.”)

Exposing young people to new people and experiences pays dividends for their social-emotional development, says Jackson.“I’ve had kids who really didn’t get along, but once they came on the team, they realized, ‘Hey, I have to work with this person.’”

This school year, DC SCORES is celebrating its 30th anniversary and Jackson is one of the few coaches who has seen the organization’s growth over its three decades in the District. In celebration of the milestone, DC SCORES made a promise to the District: to reach every Title 1 middle and elementary school by 2030. 

“[I hope DC SCORES] keep doing what they doing,” she says. “It’s about helping the children out…I think they do good, no matter what.”