IUPUI’s Ron Hunter coaches barefoot for a cause

By Mad Love
Senior Love God

It started as a small campaign for IUPUI head coach Ron Hunter.

His goal? To have 40,000 pairs of shoes donated to his cause before he was to make a trip to Africa after the season to hand them out to needy children who don’t have the resources to own shoes themselves. It was the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Hunter believed this was a cause well worth fighting for.

Well, news of good deeds often spreads quickly.

The plan had been in place for months, yet when ESPN’s “Mike and Mike In The Morning” radio got wind of the idea and broadcasted it over their airwaves recently, the campaign grew some bigger feet, if you will.

Since then, the donations have been rolling in faster than Hunter could have ever imagined. His goal of 40,000 shoes was just 10,000 short of being eclipsed when he went on the Mike and Mike show Thursday morning before his team’s conference game against Oakland.

In that game, he had pledged to coach barefoot in order to raise awareness and surpass his goal. That led to a live phone call by a representative of Converse, who donated 15,000 pairs live on the air to an obviously elated Hunter.

It was more than 10 hours before gametime, and Hunter had already had more donations than he could have ever imagined, including an office overrun by boxes and boxes of shoes he can’t even find the time to organize.

Since the game, that number has risen all the way over 110,000!! Simply an unbelievable number in such a short amount of time.

The organization he’s being sponsored by, called Samaritan’s Feet, has a fairly lofty goal of their own: providing more than 10 million pair of shoes to Africa over a 10-year period of time. The program’s well on pace to reach that number, and coach Hunter has been a big part of it.

If you want to donate your shoes, or your efforts, to Samaritan’s Feet, they can be reached at http://www.samaritansfeet.org.

Oh yeah, the Jaguars won the game, by the way. I guess that matters too, right!?

Here’s to you, coach Hunter, on a job well done!