Green Laces            

Here is the recipe. Take equal parts youthful enthusiasm, high quality soccer skills, a good education, and an opportunity to give back to the world and you have the seeds for Green Laces. Natalie Spilger has stirred this combination together and putting it on the table for athletes around the globe to try.

She was a Parade magazine all-American soccer player in high school. Then she went on to Stanford where she played on their top flight college team. She was a four-year starter at Stanford.

Natalie Spilger courtesy photo Natalie Spilger is proud of the green shoelaces she wears to promote the eco-friendly organization she founded.

But after going 21-1-1 and being eliminated by eventual champion Portland in a penalty shootout of the NCAA quarterfinals, Stanford went 10-9-2 in her senior season and exited in the first round.

“A frustrating year,” Spilger says. “I kind of was done with soccer. I feel like I had a bad breakup with soccer after my senior year.”

And for 2½ years she played little outside the occasional pickup game or co-ed rec league. Then she watched the 2006 World Cup, watched French midfield maestro Zinedine Zidane work his magic, watched “Zizou” put Brazil under his spell in an epic quarterfinal victory.

“It was inspiring,” Spilger says. “I fell in love with soccer all over again. After watching Zidane play, I couldn't wait to touch the ball again.”

So the World Cup sucked her back into the sport.

The world keeps her playing.

Spilger is out on the pitch this month as one of 72 women who will be at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista taking part in a four-day combine for Women's Professional Soccer, the new league that will launch next spring in eight cities.

You can spot Spilger as the 5-foot-6 central defender with brown hair who has an affinity for sneaking forward and scoring goals. Or you can look at her shoe laces.

They're green.

Spilger is blessed with a rich vein of family athleticism (her father and grandfather played basketball at San Diego State), but she also got a conscience in the deal. She leans on both, figuring the former can provide a platform for the latter.

Armed with an undergraduate degree in civil and environmental engineering and a master's in construction engineering management, Spilger founded GreenLaces earlier this year as a way to link her two passions. The premise is for athletes to make an eco-promise – to take shorter showers, to unplug electronics when not in use, to swear off Styrofoam cups – and seal it by wearing green shoe laces in their sneakers or soccer cleats.

“To show,” as the GreenLaces Web site (www.greenlaces.org) says, “that you are a fan of the planet.”

So far Spilger has signed up 50 elite athletes from eight countries, including two dozen Olympians from the Beijing Games. GreenLaces also sponsors projects that incorporate green messages into something as mundane as drills at youth soccer practice.

Not exactly your typical pro athlete.

“I've had a life outside soccer,” says Spilger, 26, who lived briefly in Italy, spent last year playing pro soccer in Sweden and has worked at an Internet start-up as well as an energy services company. “Leveraging soccer to create a greater good is what I'm excited about. Good athletes are icons in every corner of the world, so if we're going to attack a global problem, let's use existing global social structures.

“It's really easy. We're not asking (pro) athletes to bike and get rid of their Hummers. Just take shorter showers, or something. It's green within your means. We're not asking you to live in trees.”

Spilger lives in what she describes as a “mansion” in San Francisco's Marina district. Seven others live there as well. They have a compost pit. They recycle everything. She pitched WPS on GreenLaces after arriving at the league's San Francisco offices on a skateboard.

Her personal eco-promise: I, Natalie Spilger, promise to never purchase a non-reusable plastic water bottle, unless in an emergency situation.

Spilger attended a regional WPS combine earlier this year with about 30 players. By the end of the weekend, she had convinced about one-third of them to wear the green laces which, of course, are made from “100 percent, post-consumer recycled plastic and packaged sustainability.”

She's hoping for a similar conversion rate in Chula Vista this month.

The genesis of GreenLaces was a speech she heard from famed environmentalist Paul Hawken at a 2007 conference in Chicago for green building. It was a Zidane moment for her.

“I felt really inspired that I liked our planet and I wanted to do my part,” Spilger says. “I started thinking about being an athlete and what sort of people should be stepping up . . . I decided I didn't just want green buildings. I wanted green minds.”

Natalie lives in the Bay Area and works with youth soccer players in the East Bay as a trainer. Perhaps if you have an interest in this cause you can visit Green Laces and get yourself a pair of them and show your colors on the soccer field next season. A good cause from a great player.