GSU Basketball Coach Ron Hunter Goes on Global Mission, Provides Footwear for Children

While most of his players and the majority of the nearly 30,000 students enrolled at Georgia State University enjoy a well-deserved break from 8 a.m. lectures, exams and term papers, GSU men’s basketball head coach Ron Hunter is on a mission.

You won’t find Hunter locked in his office, remote in hand, dissecting game film in preparation for his first season on the Panther’s bench. Hunter won’t be hard at work on the recruiting trail, or even in the gym.

Instead, for the next week, Hunter will be halfway around the globe washing feet, distributing shoes and trying his best to change the world - one pair at a time.

Hunter left for Nigeria Thursday evening on a seven-day trip with Samaritan’s Feet, a charitable organization whose ambassadors have washed the feet of and distributed shoes to nearly 3 million people in over 40 countries in the past six years.

This will be Hunter’s fifth trip overseas with Samaritan’s Feet, and his second visit to Nigeria, the home country of Samaritan’s Feet founder and CEO, Manny Ohonme.

“One of the things that makes me continue to do it is that in the morning when we start the process of washing the children’s feet and we get them socks and shoes, at the end of the day, there are still people in that line waiting,” Hunter said. “That’s the part that really bothers me and keeps me going.”

In spite of their best efforts, much work still needs to be done: an estimated 300 million people around the world go without shoes each day.

Hunter and his fellow Samaritan’s Feet ambassadors hope to make a dent in this wall of misfortune by distributing 85,000 pairs of shoes during their time in the West African nation. Though that number is hardly a fraction of the total worldwide population who suffers from foot disease or remains barefoot, Hunter realizes that what he is offering the children he encounters is much more than a new pair of Nikes.

“Really it’s not about the shoes,” Hunter said. “What we try to give the kids is hope. I tell people all the time, ‘We don’t have poverty in this country.’ Poverty is when you don’t have shoes. Poverty is when you have no place to live. Poverty is not knowing where your next meal will come from.”

Even on the basketball court, Hunter has succeeded in raising awareness about this global problem. Since 2008, Hunter has coached one game barefoot. His charitable deeds haven’t gone unnoticed by his peers as over 1,000 other coaches at various levels and in a variety of sports have also paced the sidelines barefoot in support of this worthy cause.

Of course, the first-year Panthers head coach plans to continue that tradition this upcoming season.

Though Hunter will rightfully be judged as a coach based on wins and losses, to him, even the greatest achievements on the basketball court can’t help but seem insignificant in the big picture.

“There’s no Final Four, there’s no national championship, there’s no game I’ll ever coach in my life that will ever compare to what we do when we give out those shoes to those children.”