On February 2, 2002, sixteen parents mourning the recent sports related death of their children invited me to attend a meeting in Pennsylvania. They knew of the work that I was doing as the editor-in-chief of MomsTeam.com to educate parents about ways to prevent catastrophic injury and death while our children play sports.

They asked if I would publish additional articles about the charities they had set up in their children's memory, and to continue to provide parents and the youth sports community with current and reliable sports safety information so that no other children died while playing youth sports.

They also stressed the need for a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization to serve as an umbrella for the private charities that they had set up, to allow them to continue the important work they were doing at the grassroots level to educate people about the critical need for life-saving equipment and safety standards in youth sports. Out of these meetings The Teams of Angels was formed in 2002.

Our first national campaign ran from 2003-2005. It was called: SAVE A CHILDS LIFE: An AED for Every Team. The Teams of Angels partnered with MomsTeam.com to provide over 500 AEDs, either at cost or for outright donations, to organizations that serve youth athletes.

In August, for the second year in a row, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) joined forces with the Teams of Angels and MomsTeam.com to help promote Head Injury Awareness with information on concussions in youth athletes. The CDC campaign entitled, "Heads Up: Concussion in Youth Sports."

Future campaigns are planned, to encourage full pre-participation physical evaluations and testing, to detect congenital heart defects that could result in sudden cardiac arrest.

Currently, we are beginning a national outreach to educate people on the dangers of Particulate Matter Pollution near our children's playing fields. This has become a serious area of concern because of the close proximity of new playing fields to highways, in spite of mounting medical journal articles about the epidemiological evidence concerning vehicular air pollution and adverse respiratory/cardiovascular health.

Please check back often, as we continue to update the web site, for additional new and exciting campaigns to help bring awareness to potential safety and health issues for our youth athletes.

Sincerely,

Brooke de Lench
Chairman, Board of Directors
Teams of Angels

September 2, 2007