TALENT IS EVERYWHERE. OPPORTUNITY IS NOT.
Good People Deserve Wins Too covers what it costs to play. Registration, equipment, travel, for young athletes in the Rochester region whose families can't cover it on their own.
GOOD PEOPLE DESERVE WINS TOO
GOOD PEOPLE DESERVE WINS TOO
Good People Deserve Wins Too is a Rochester nonprofit with one job. Making sure a kid who wants to play gets to play.
We're not a league, and we're not a program. We're who shows up when a family can't cover registration, when the equipment costs more than the season does, when a team finally makes the tournament and can't afford the bus to get there.
Nobody here takes a salary. Every dollar that comes in goes right back out to a youth athlete in our community, which means this organization isn't really us. It's the coaches. The parents. The business owners. The people who buy a ticket and the people who write a check. They're the good people. We just do the paperwork.
WHAT IT COSTS
Registration. Cleats, pads, a stick, a helmet that fits. Gas to get to practice four nights a week and a hotel room for the tournament two hours away.
Add it up and one kid costs a family about a thousand dollars a season. For a lot of families in this city, that number is the whole reason their kid stopped asking.
What that money buys reaches past the sport. A team. A coach who knows their name. Somewhere to be at four o'clock. Character building. Teamwork. Self Mastery.
It’s more than a game.
HOW IT WORKS
Somebody nominates an athlete or a team. Anyone can do it. A coach, a teacher, a parent, a neighbor, somebody's grandmother. Coaches send us the most because they're the ones who notice first, but the door is open to everybody.
We find out what's actually in the way. Sometimes it's the registration fee. Sometimes it's a five-hundred-dollar goalie setup or a bus that doesn't run to the field.
We cover it. Directly, and fast enough to get them back in the game.
OUR IMPACT
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40+ YOUTH ATHLETES SPONSORED
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20+ YOUTH TEAMS FUNDED
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500+ COMMUNITY MEMBERS ENGAGED
GET INVOLVED
5th Annual Queen of Hearts Casino Night featuring Andre Reed
February 5, 2027, at Harro East. Casino tables, a live band, and a Hall of Famer in the room who spent four straight seasons in the Super Bowl. Come for the night out; leave having put a kid back on the field.
Your business needs photo and video content, and we need to fund the season, so we built something that does both. Book a shoot with Moxie Creative Studios through this campaign, and the proceeds go straight back to our athletes. Booking closes November 1.
Content for a Cause
Sponsor a Student Athlete
A thousand dollars covers one kid for a full season. Registration, the equipment they've outgrown, and the gas money to get to every practice and every game. One check, one athlete, one year they don't have to sit out.
IN THE NEWS
Buffalo Rising sat down with us to talk about what it costs to keep a kid on a team. A thousand dollars a season, a registration fee that ends it, and the community that tells us who needs what.
13WHAM came out to La Luna for Queen of Hearts and showed our community exactly what this looks like on a Friday night. A live band, a casino floor, and 250 people who all turned out to get kids in the game.
FROM THE FOUNDER
Sports changed the direction of my life when I was thirteen.
I grew up in Lebanon and landed in Rochester, and sports is what made this place mine. I learned how to be part of something. How to show up when I didn't feel like it. How to lose and come back the next day anyway. I had coaches who knew my name and expected something from me, and that mattered more than any of us understood at the time.
Somebody made sure that cost was not the reason I sat out. I have never forgotten what that did for me. Not once.
Years later, I watched a local team scrambling to raise the money just to compete. Good kids, a good coach, a season sitting right there in front of them, and the only thing standing in the way was a number. I couldn’t let it go. So we started this.
And here's what I've learned since. It is almost never one big request. It's a registration fee due Friday. It's cleats that don't fit anymore. It's a tournament three hours away and no way to get there. Small numbers to some people, and the entire reason a kid stops asking to play for a lot of others.
Talent is everywhere in this region. Opportunity is not. That gap is the whole purpose of what we do.
Every kid we've put back on a field got there because somebody in this community decided to show up. If you're reading this and thinking about it, you're one of them. THANK YOU.
With gratitude,
Nelly Epic
Founder, Good People Deserve Wins Too