by Susan Johnston Taylor, Contributor

After his 16-year-old son Zak died in a jet-ski accident and his 20-year marriage fell apart six months later, Mark Lukas found himself at a crossroads. Several years earlier, he’d been mesmerized by the sight of a Border Collie dribbling a soccer ball at a stadium in Tampa, so in 2004 Lukas adopted his own Border Collie in the hopes of teaching her to play soccer. Lukas named the dog Ms. Z in honor of his son, who’d loved animals and soccer.

Even as a puppy, Ms. Z proved herself to be a quick learner. “I just gave her a ball and I was busy working and she wanted to play,” says Lukas, who lives in central Florida. “Next thing you know she was getting more and more proficient at it. Then she got to think[ing] that every human was born to play soccer with her.” When she didn’t have Lukas or his friends helping practice her ball-handling abilities, Ms. Z even played with the vacuum because it pushed the ball back to her.

Lukas’s vision for dogs playing soccer morphed from a one-on-one game with soccer goals to a group activity. Eventually, Ms. Z and her ball-loving tendencies led Lukas to create a team of dogs called Soccer Collies. “Border collies are high-energy dogs,” Lukas says. “People don’t know with to do with them, but the trick is to keep them tired. Kick the ball around and in five to ten minutes they’re tired.” Lukas took in several more Border Collies, including one named BEK after David Beckham, who played for the English National Team (there called football, not soccer). BEK is now ten years old.

Unfortunately, Ms. Z passed away three years ago following surgery for uterine infection that went undetected for too long. But now her legacy lives on in Soccer Collies. Ms. Z’s illness (and another dog’s unexpected pregnancy) also inspired Lukas to promote spaying and neutering dogs to prevent overpopulation and because uterine issues like Pyometra occur in intact dogs.

Soccer Collies is the entertainment arm of Lukas’s venture and Soccer Dogs is the nonprofit arm that teaches dogs in need of homes to play soccer. Over a million dogs are euthanized each year, according to the ASPCA, and Lukas believes many of them are ball-motivated enough to learn soccer. He hopes showing potential pet owners this side of rescue dogs can help reduce the number of unadopted dogs put to sleep. “I believe [ball-motivated dogs] have a lot of value,” he says. “To me they are as valuable as a service dog they represent a valuable skill. Almost every child wants these dogs.”

Now Lukas brings ball-motivated rescue dogs to charity events around central Florida as entertainment and a way for those dogs to get adopted. In addition to delighting children, Soccer Dogs also brighten the lives of senior citizens. “I’d been working at an assisted living facility with 80- and 90-year-old residents,” he says. “A lot of them are in a wheelchair. The dog plays with every one of them and they’re smiling and laughing.” In fact, he’s recently adopted a puppy named Brentwood after the assisted living facility where he worked. Brentwood is a Poodle-Collie mix that Lukas hopes might become a soccer dog at a place like his namesake.

Over the last ten years, Lukas estimates that he’s attended over 100 events with Soccer Dogs, meeting countless people who have their own soccer-playing dogs of all varieties. “Someone has a Chihuahua who plays soccer,” Lukas says. “I’ve seen Corgis and Terriers, all different breeds are playing soccer.”

This fall, Lukas left his job to focus on Soccer Dogs full-time and promote the soccer dog movement. He wants create a tradition where communities across the country have soccer dog games on weekend mornings and also encourage dog rescues to create soccer dog programs. “I think that it’s going to benefit the dogs, rescues, foster dog families, I hope to be traveling with this around the country,” he says. “If you don’t want to adopt it, you can foster a soccer dog and some other family would love to adopt it.”

To identify rescue dog who might be good candidates, Lukas suggests bouncing a ball outside of their kennel to see if it piques their interest. Some dogs will shy away from the ball but if they’re curious, watch how they interact with it. “If they start to push the ball around, you have a soccer dog,” he says. “I want to identity the dogs and work with them and get more money for those dogs.”

Lukas acknowledges that Soccer Dogs still has a lot of work to do, but he feels the work is a tribute to his late son Zak. “I know that my son would love this project,” he says. “The funny thing is if he had not died I probably would not be doing this. It’s really weird to look at it this way, but I love what I’m doing and it’s because of his death that I’m doing it.”