Mark Story: Morehead coach baring his soles to help those in need

One need not possess the imaginative powers of J.K. Rowling to see why coaching a college football game in late October in Kentucky in one's bare feet seems a bad idea.

Who knows what kind of object that one wouldn't want to step on might be dropped along a sideline?

College football players wear cleats; having one's toes crushed by them sounds remarkably unpleasant.

What if it snows?

As you'll see, Morehead State head football coach Matt Ballard has thought of all this. Yet for the Eagles' homecoming game Saturday, he's going barefoot anyway.

Ballard, 51, is going without shoes during his team's meeting with Marist so that underprivileged children around the world will no longer have to go barefoot every day.

His shoeless game is being done for Samaritan's Feet, the Charlotte, N.C.-based charity that seeks to provide footwear to children around the globe who have never had a pair of shoes.

During Saturday's MSU football game, fans will be asked to text the word "shoes" to 85944. When they do so, a $5 charge will be applied to their next phone bill that will go toward providing shoes for children without them in South Africa.

You don't have to be at the Morehead game to send the text that becomes a donation.

"My personal challenge to people is find 10 other people, family, friends, people they work with and get them to send the text," Ballard said.

With the football coach leading the way, others at Morehead have joined the cause. The MSU marching band will lead a "barefoot march" to Jayne Stadium before Saturday's 1 p.m. kickoff. The band members are making a donation of actual shoes that will go to those in need in Eastern Kentucky.

Samaritan's Feet was started by a Nigerian named Emmanuel Ohonme. When Ohonme was a 9-year-old in Lagos, a volunteer from Wisconsin gave him a pair of tennis shoes.

They were the first shoes Ohonme had ever had. He says they changed his life.

Eventually, Ohonme earned a basketball scholarship to a college in North Dakota. There he met and married an American woman. He launched a career with a U.S. technology company.

But Ohonme couldn't get out of his mind the role that a stranger giving him shoes had played in his life. He formed Samaritan's Feet in order to do the same thing for others.

It is the organization that Ron Hunter, the basketball coach at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, has gone barefoot during hoops games to promote.

In fact, Hunter led indirectly to Ballard's upcoming shoeless game.

Earlier this school year, Melisa McBrayer-Pratt, a marketing official for Morehead State's Center for Regional Engagement, was looking for a campus project that could be promoted for national "Make a Difference Day" (which is Saturday).

In a prior job as a marketing official for Chick-fil-A in Indianapolis, McBrayer-Pratt had watched Hunter generate donations that turned into 140,000 pairs of shoes.

"I contacted Samaritan's Feet and we were having discussions," McBrayer-Pratt said. "And they asked about our football coach, said they'd had basketball coaches go barefoot but never a football coach. They wondered if Coach Ballard would be willing to be the first. I said I'd ask."

When that call came, Ballard said his only hesitation was concern that the head coach going barefoot in a game might be a distraction for his team.

"There's really no reason why it should be," the Morehead coach said. "What I'm wearing or not wearing on my feet shouldn't have any impact at all on the players on the field."

But being barefoot on the sideline could have an impact on the head coach — or at least the well-being of his toes.

Since Jayne Stadium has a state-of-the-art synthetic playing surface, "there will be a lot of rubber beneath my feet," Ballard said. "It ought to be fairly comfortable, though my feet may end up pitch black."

The MSU coach said folks around Morehead keep asking him what he'll do if Saturday's weather turns frigid.

Ballard admits he's spent the week "curious about the weather report." He says his understanding is that it's supposed to be "about 58 degrees and raining, which is fine," he said. "But even if it comes a blizzard, I'm going barefoot."

Then there is the thought of having one's toes crushed by large athletes wearing cleats.

"I may not be as quick or as nimble as I used to be," Ballard said, "but, trust me, if the action comes my way Saturday, I'll be getting out of the way."

Besides, Ballard said the risk of mashed toes is a minuscule one for the chance to literally put shoes on the feet of a child who has none.

"When you think of how many pairs of shoes are in your closet or mine and how much we pay for them, $5 for shoes for a child that's never had any is so small," he said.

"If me going without shoes in a game could change the life of even one child, how could I not do it?"

This story was originally published October 23, 2009 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Mark Story: Morehead coach baring his soles to help those in need."