It was just after Christmas in 2018, and Charlie Felton, then just two-and-a-half, stood in the doorway of her Chalfont home, her blue eyes bright behind her pink glasses, her pigtails in place.

“Mommy, my head hurts,” she said.

Charlie’s parents, Amanda and Chris, thought maybe it was Charlie’s new glasses; they took her to her eye doctor, who didn’t like what she saw. Ultimately, the Feltons wound up Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), where Charlie began a series of harrowing tests.

Eventually, the Feltons learned that Charlie had a rare genetic mutation, an endocrine disorder that affected her bone growth. Among other things, it had led to craniosynostosis, a condition in which the bones of the skull fuse too early. Doctors explained that Charlie would need to undergo a six-hour surgery, with doctors removing parts of her skull and inserting metal rods; for weeks after, Chris would have to turn those rods to expand Charlie’s skull, giving her brain the room it needed to grow.

After surgery, Charlie began regular physical therapy, occupational therapy, vision therapy; she had multiple MRIs and spinal taps and procedures; took daily medicines and saw specialists regularly. Charlie, a preternatural trooper, remained in good spirits, focused on typical kiddo pleasures: Halloween and her beloved stuffed animals, hanging out with her two older siblings.

Then, last winter, Charlie was suddenly unable to walk. And in January 2024, her family learned that all those years of chronic pain and medical trauma had taken a toll on Charlie’s brain; it wasn’t sending the right signals for Charlie, by then 8, to walk properly.

“Life with a medically complex child is full of ups-and-downs, a whirlwind of emotion,” Amanda says. But one constant source of love, support, and unwavering hope for the entire Felton family shone through: the University of Pennsylvania women’s softball team — Charlie’s team.

Athletes on a mission

In 2022, the Ivy League athletes and Charlie connected through Team IMPACT Philly, the regional offshoot of Team IMPACT, a national organization founded by, among others, Dan Kraft, president of Boston’s renowned Kraft Group-International. One of Kraft’s co-founders, Jay Calnan, had seen firsthand how his brother, who’d been sidelined from sports due to a congenital condition, had benefited by becoming a batboy for a minor league baseball team.

So Kraft, Calnan, and their friends — all former college athletes — decided to create Team IMPACT. Their mission: to serve kids 5 to 16 facing any number of up to 250 life-altering medical conditions and disabilities.

In 2011, they officially launched the organization by matching Ben, a nine-year-old battling cancer, with the St. Anselm’s College men’s hockey team. They’ve since paired more than 3,380 children with teams across the U.S., and become certified through the National Disability Mentoring Coalition (NDMC) in Inclusive Mentoring Practices.

Unlike other services that often collaborate with pediatric health centers, Team IMPACT prides itself on being more than a photo op or meet-and-greet. The organization has a team of 15 clinically-trained staffers — master’s level social workers and child-life specialists — who guide the program, from the time a child is matched with a team through the entirety of the therapeutic, two-year program. The program’s core goals, which apply to the children they serve and the teams who support them, are resilience, empowerment, socialization, and health promotion; teams are trained in nurturing each of these traits.

The Penn softball team visits Charlie during her CHOP stays, makes her signs and cards that travel from hospital to home. More than that, they include her in their sisterhood: She shows up at the end of practices to play backyard games like cops-n-robbers. They go to Phillies games together and she joins the Halloween celebrations the young women have created for her. They have run 5Ks with her and completed a triathlon. They know her favorite movies and stuffed animals and books.

Charlie visits the training room and sits in the dugout during games. On the shelf of her bedroom sits the team photo, Charlie front and center, alongside a sample of sand from the infield. If you look on the official Penn softball roster, you’ll even see Charlie listed — number 0, “redshirt freshman.”

This winter, Charlie’s best friends, as she calls them, will be at Charlie’s YMCA basketball game to cheer her on before having dinner at the Felton home.

Madison Bauerle, now a senior at Penn, says Charlie is like another sister to her — that the Feltons are like a second family. “It’s the same way with Charlie as it is with your other college teammates — you see them as a sister. And it really brings out a protective family component,” says Bauerle. “Charlie has given me a new perspective on sports. It goes beyond competition, beyond a score at the end of the game.”

In Philly, an alphabet soup of more than 20 colleges are involved, everyone from Penn to Villanova, Arcadia to Ursinis, Temple and La Salle, Haverford and Drexel. Since launching here in 2018, they’ve paired more than 200 kids with local teams for “signing day” events, outings, games, and more.

The mid-Atlantic division of Team IMPACT, of which Philly is a part, is run by Josh Walker. Walker is a former college wrestler who competed at Penn State and coached at the University of Virginia. Youth and college sports gave Walker space to succeed and fail with the support of a team around him, he says. Sports played a formative role in his life – as did the next realm he worked in, pediatric healthcare.

“There’s no more important cause in the world,” Walker says. He had worked his way up to Director of Development at CHOP when the opportunity to join Team IMPACT arose. So while considering the role, he spoke to colleagues in CHOP’s child-life and social work departments. “Josh,” they said, “We work with a lot of organizations, many of whom we wouldn’t encourage you to pursue — Team IMPACT is doing something different.”

“The deeper I dove into what Team IMPACT does, the more I was taken with the fact it’s not just something that is a ‘nice-to-have,’ or a box that gets checked either by the athletes or the families,” Walker says. “It is an immersive relationship that is meant to support a child who is going through a serious illness or disability during the formative years of their life.”

Beyond medicine

By now, Walker says, every children’s hospital understands the importance of psycho-social care and the idea that there’s more to treating a child than just giving them medicine. The challenge, he says, is that even at the best hospitals, when the child leaves the four walls of the hospital, they cannot guarantee the support that a child has.

“What Team IMPACT has done is build a program that is an extension of psycho-social care, outside the hospital. And that has allowed us to walk into the doors of CHOP, Boston Children’s Hospital, Children’s National, Mattel — all the top children’s hospitals — and be able to look the caregivers in the eyes and say, We can help take care of your patients, and we can do it in a clinically responsible way.”

It’s also enabled colleges to deliver on their promise to student-athletes and their families — throughout the recruitment process and beyond — that their athletes will leave their program a better human. “If you ask a student athlete, they’ll say they get more out of the Team IMPACT experience than the children and families do,” Walker says. “Of course, what we’ve found is that they both get a lot out of it.”

The Feltons would agree. “The team’s presence in Charlie’s life — and ours — has brought more than just friends,” Amanda says. “From the moment Charlie was welcomed by the team, we were embraced in a way we could not imagine.” The young women have given Charlie confidence, and a sense of belonging. “As upbeat as Charlie has always remained, being on the playground, being around other kids her age, is not easy,” Amanda says. “It’s hard to explain your differences.” With the Penn athletes, there’s no need to explain.

“These are Ivy League athletes with the brightest futures, who unconditionally carve out space in their hearts for Charlie, a place where no explanations are needed,” Amanda recently said to a crowd of Team IMPACT Philly supporters at the nonprofit’s annual fundraiser.

“They have been nothing short of life-changing for Charlie, and for Chris and me as parents.”

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