Our Team

Xavier Pedroza, PRESIDENT

Born and raised in Boston, MA, Xavier moved to CT with his family in 2001. He became involved with Six2Six in 2007 and FFI in 2017.

His experience with the game of soccer dates back to when he traveled with his mother to her homeland of Colombia as a 7-year-old. The love of the "beautiful game" was embedded in the culture of his family with weekends devoted to games.

Another passion of his is community service and volunteerism. Since serving as a Big Brother in college, he has continued to seek opportunities to help and give back to his community. In addition to FFI, Xavier volunteers with Junior Achievement, KPMG Family for Literacy, and Boston Partners in Education.

Peter Chapman, special events coordinator

Peter’s first exposure to the beautiful game was as a 3-year-old toddler in Luton, England, when his Uncle George hit him full in the face with a soccer ball. Undeterred, Peter has been kicking a ball ever since. He began playing for the Denbigh Road Juniors team in 1963 and is still playing (somewhat) competitively with the Southbury Boomers over-60 team.

Peter joined Futbol Friends in 2014. The idea for the very first Six2six soccerthon came to Peter while he was walking his dog, Norman, at Three Rivers Park in Woodbury, Connecticut, where he lives with his wife, Clare (in a house, not in the park).

chris ballard, director of marketing

Chris has been a supporter of Futbol Friends for close to ten years, playing several hours each year in Six2Six, and last year the group that he runs, Newtown Pickup Soccer, was a sponsor for the first time.

Chris will be helping to improve the communication and marketing, using his 20 years’ experience as we look to update the website, get more visible on social media, and share more of the good work that we’ve been able to fund. Chris lives in Newtown with his wife Rebecca and 3 cats, all of whom tolerate his obsession/despair with Torquay United, a team so bad that even people in Torquay itself try to ignore its existence. 

Scott Bagley, Vice President

Scott’s futbol-fanatic father tried his best to introduce the game to him at three years old, but unfortunately, he was too interested in chasing butterflies (off the pitch) to engage with the on-field action. Fast forward 15 years and four sports later and he finally found his first competitive play and has stuck around the sport ever since. Even though he wasn’t always interested in playing himself, Scott was immediately fascinated by soccer's community-building (and friendship-facilitating) power, as the game was for his father. Outside of Futbol Friends, Scott is a native Rhode Islander (living in Boston currently), avid traveler, snowboarder, and marketer/entrepreneur by trade.

Chris Armentano, Secretary

A chartering member, Chris first put his toe to ball at 15 years old, and stayed involved with soccer until permanently sidelined by a broken leg in his early 50s. Along the way, soccer introduced him to players and fans from every corner of the globe, some of these folks were from places so under-developed that their soccer balls were often crafted from bundles of rags.

These days, he continues to express his affection for the game through Futbol Friends, where he hopes to help kids and their communities experience the joys of futbol because, as it’s been said, “for people with nothing, soccer is everything.”

Bob Clarke, Senior Advisor

Born in a galaxy not far from here in Connecticut eons ago, Bob spent a deprived youth – ignorant of soccer. It wasn’t until his fraternity days at University of Connecticut that he first became aware of the game. Later, when he joined the faculty of an independent school -- following his Masters program at BU and a stint on a collegiate faculty-- he learned the finer points of the game under the tutelage of a European grand master of the sport.

Following his many years in collegiate, independent, and industrial education, he is spending his retirement years giving back through nonprofit, including Futbol Friends, and local government work. Bob says that he is ending a dull and fairly uneventful life, or as Shakespeare put it: “Last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history is second childishness and mere oblivion sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”