A cold and blustery Harlem welcomed a soccer superstar, a windsurfing champion and a Dutch prince on Friday. Here to highlight the importance of sports as a tool for social change, Robbie Naish, Edwin van der Sar and Prince Pieter-Christiaan van Oranje got their hands dirty, joining in a soccer match between fourth and fifth graders from PS 192 and PS 325.

The 64 youngsters were participating in an after-school development course run by America SCORES, a national program that provides soccer, poetry and community service lessons to children from low-income families.

“It’s a great program for the kids both academically and physically,” saidPS 192 soccer coach, Larry Wingate, as he stood on the side, cheering on his team.

He proudly watched his boys run up and down the pitch exhaustively, unafraid to get stuck in, sometimes falling over, always enthusiastic. The cheers when they scored were matched only by their groans a few minutes later when they conceded, the goalkeeper apparently having fallen asleep.

Wingate is part of the Coach Across America program, which places sports coaches in youth organizations like America SCORES. James Kallusky, the executive director, described these coaches as “mentors” who analyze not just the children’s physical health, but their “emotional, the moral and the cognitive well-being, too.”

Empowerment and self-confidence are crucial to the program, said Paul Caccomo, executive director of Up2Us, the umbrella organization that runs Coach Across America.  Caccomo highlighted some of the problems facing the young soccer players.

“We have a very high dropout rate in our public schools, an enormous childhood obesity rate, about 800,000 of our kids are in gangs,” he said.

His program aims to use sports to inspire young people, but Caccomo believes that the $3.5 billion cuts to public school sports programs will have a devastating effect on communities like Harlem; “they’ll hit the low-income communities the worst,” he said.

The three celebrities came to Harlem as ambassadors of the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, a London-based organization that celebrates the power of sports to effect social change. Friday was the launch of their partnership with Coach Across America to provide 115 coaches throughout Manhattan. The foundation runs 89 sports-community projects in 39 countries, and its famous ambassadors visit to encourage both participants and coaches, explained its global director, Ned Wills.

“A lot of these guys have taken a lot of benefit from sports personally and want to give back,” Wills said.

It was difficult to get Van der Sar off the pitch on Friday. The goalkeeper, who retired from Manchester United and Holland this summer, showed off his skills to his adoring audience, and at one point ran to tend to a boy on the ground with an injury. At the end of the game he challenged some of the youngsters to a penalty shootout.

Windsurfer Robby Naish said: “Sports sure did an awful lot for me, and it’s crucial for kids’ development. Just the right bit of steering at the right time in their lives is crucial at steering them in the right path.”

Van der Sar said he believed the shouts and cheers that engulfed the Jacob Schiff Field were a sign of soccer’s popularity.

“I spoke to a girl and her mother and if you see how into soccer they were, it’s so cool,” he said during his first visit to Harlem.

Jaden Pitman, 8, scored a goal as his mother looked on proudly. A pupil at PS 325, Jaden said soccer was his favorite sport. Today his team ended up on the losing side of a 2-1 match with PS 192.  When players on the winning team were asked whether they enjoyed the after-school program, they all screamed “yes.”

Nine-year-old Jose Henriques, who scored the winning goal, said he’d heard of Manchester United, though not directly of van der Sar.  But Henriques was sure of one thing: He wants to continue to play sports, especially soccer.

Prince Pieter-Christiaan admitted he has “two left feet” when it comes to soccer, but said he’d come to Harlem to celebrate “the many people who start these programs and who change lives. It’s not easy in this part of Manhattan, especially with the school dropouts, so I greatly admire them.”

Today’s event was planned to deliberately coincide with the New York City Marathon, which he and van der Sar are running in Sunday.

“The marathon weekend is one of the largest single days of physical activity in the nation, and yet it’s taking place right here in New York where many of our kids have obesity problems,” Caccamo said. “There’s a message there.”

Friday was about shining the celebrity spotlight on programs intended to tackle the stark problems many poor children face. The public school dropout rate in New York is around 35 percent, according to the Mayor’s office, and with state and federal budget cuts, the education, health and crime problems will worsen, Wills said.

“This is the time you should be increasing investment in these programs,” he said.