Ben Soloway ’14 Receives Disney Grant to Fund Service Initiative

Ben Soloway has been playing tennis since he was three, so you can imagine how many hundreds of old, deflated, useless tennis balls he had sitting around in his basement.
Ben Soloway has been playing tennis since he was three, so you can imagine how many hundreds of old, deflated, useless tennis balls he had sitting around in his basement.

“We were just going to throw them away,” said Soloway, the captain of Rivers’ varsity tennis team. “I’ve hit probably thousands of tennis balls, and just knowing that many balls were going into the trash was kind of depressing. It’s ridiculous that every single ball that I’ve hit was going into a landfill.”

Soloway may have hated the idea of so much material going to waste, but there simply isn’t much you can do with old tennis balls. You could re-inflate them, but that was basically it – that is, until Soloway thought of another way to put the balls to good use.

Soloway’s sister is a student at the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Mass. One day, Soloway was visiting her, and he got a good look at the equestrian turf at Dana’s riding center. He noticed the turf was made out of rubber and fiber – materials that are very similar to those that make up a tennis ball.

“I said, ‘Well, that’s odd. I wonder if that same thing could work with tennis balls,’” Soloway said.

It turns out he was onto something.

After doing a little bit of research, Soloway found that old tennis balls could, in fact, be used to create new riding turf. In fact, the only ingredient found in most riding turf, but not in tennis balls, is sand.

With that, Project Green Ball was born.

Project Green Ball is a sustainability initiative created by Soloway and his father that seeks to collect used tennis balls and recycle them into ball-based equestrian turfs. It is the only organization within the United States that recycles tennis balls, sending them to a turf manufacturer in New York. Once the manufacturer receives 200,000 balls from Project Green Ball, it will donate a ball-based equestrian surface to a therapeutic riding center that services people with disabilities or people who suffer from life-threatening illnesses.

Already, Project Green Ball has received support from Wilson Sporting Goods, the New England chapter of the U.S. Tennis Association, and from local clubs, camps, and individuals. Recently, Dana Hall purchased one of the ball-based turfs and has found it to be even more effective than the traditional turf it had installed just a few years prior.

Thus far, Project Green Ball has raised more than 74,000 tennis balls—but it still has a long way to go until it reaches its goal of 200,000. Finding donors hasn’t been easy.

“It’s kind of tough,” Soloway admitted. “Being able to ship the balls to our turf manufacturer is our biggest struggle right now. A lot of times, we get clubs that are willing to donate but aren’t willing to pay the money to ship the balls—so either we have to go out and collect the balls ourselves, or they just don’t donate them.”

Recently, Project Green Ball was awarded a $1,000 grant from Disney Friends For Change. Jeanette Szretter, the director of community service at Rivers, encouraged Soloway to apply for the community service grant after he was named a Green Leader at Green Schools, an award-winning nonprofit that seeks to create healthier and greener learning environments through education, awareness, and action.

Some of the funds Project Green Ball received from Disney will go toward placing collection bins in outdoor parks and in clubs; other funds will go toward creating pamphlets and banners that will increase visibility for the cause and encourage participation.

Soloway insists that he may not have been inspired to begin Project Green Ball at all had it not been for the encouragement he received from Szretter and the Rivers community.

“I did service days here at Rivers, and that made me really interested in community service, and I found that was something I was passionate about,” Soloway said. “That was really what made me interested in doing something for myself – creating my own type of event that could help the community around me.”

And once Soloway reaches his goal of 200,000 tennis balls, will that be the end for Project Green Ball? Of course not.

“Basically,” he said, “we’re just going to keep trying to collect as many multiples of 200,000 as we can.”

If you’re interested in helping Project Green Ball reach its goal, visit www.projectgreenball.com, or send an email to info@projectgreenball.com to find out how you can get involved.
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