Sunday night, Jacob Levitt left a birthday party he'd been at with his parents and siblings, went home to gather up notes on his research, and headed off to make his presentation to a board.

He was nervous. This was the culmination of months of hard work, and Levitt, 13, wanted to make a good impression. He was imagining the board would be crusty and forbidding, seated around a table in a conference room.

Turned out, it wasn't like that at all. The nine board members were seated on a couch and some chairs arranged in a circle in borrowed space, a former factory building in Florence. They were all parents much like his own, Ellen Goldsmith and Sam Levitt of Lyman Road, and they were eager to hear what he had to say.

"It was a very friendly audience," Jacob said afterward. "They seemed very interested in the issue and they want to help."

The issue Jacob was talking to them about was child labor and other unfair labor practices, and once he got going, he barely had to look at his notes. He knows the material really well. He's studied up on it at school and on his own.

And he was here to ask the board of the Northampton Soccer Club to take a big step - to stop using the balls they'd been using and begin to use soccer balls made by Fair Trade Sports, a company based in Seattle.

"Surprisingly enough, Fair Trade Sports is the only fair-trade sports equipment company in the United States," Levitt, 13, told me in the van on the way over to the board meeting. He was fiddling with the straps of a cloth bag filled with orange, white and black soccer balls which he'd ordered from the company to make his pitch. He was wearing a bright orange T-shirt from the company.

He and his mother have been in touch with someone from the Northampton Recreation Department as well, to see if the city would consider using fair-trade balls for its leagues, and Jacob hopes Northampton High School will make a similar switch for its teams. He's also organizing a pickup soccer game for June 5, where fair-trade balls will be used, and where he hopes to take orders from people who want them.

Jacob's interest in the issue began last year, when his sixth grade class at the Smith Campus School took up a unit on child labor. Jacob was shocked when he learned that in some parts of the world, some children are sold into slavery, and work obscenely long hours in horrifying conditions in unregulated sweatshops.

"I was astounded," he said. "I thought I wanted to do something about that."

He wasn't sure how to channel his energy, but this year at JFK Middle School, he joined an after-school club called SANDBOCS - an acronym for Saving All Neglected, Denied, and Blatantly Oppressed Children from Slavery, but also a play on that beacon of childhood fun, the sandbox. That group only deepened his interest in the topic.

Also, this year, as part of his bar mitzvah preparation, Jacob must take on a social justice project. This convergence led Jacob to combine his love of sports with his passion about the immorality of child labor.

"I thought it was a perfect opportunity for me to do something about this issue I feel so strongly about," he said.

No question sports is something this boy feels strongly about. As we waited outside the board meeting for him to be called in, I asked Jacob what his favorite sport is, to which he replied, in all seriousness, "Soccer and baseball and basketball and tennis and Frisbee."

His presentation was part sales pitch, part consciousness raising. He explained about the working conditions facing adults and children in developing countries, and said the only way to be sure that workers are treated humanely is to use fair-trade products. He talked about pricing and the advantages of ordering in bulk, and then passed around some balls for inspection.

Board members had a few questions relating to cost, and whether the balls could be ordered in different color schemes. (Orange and black are Agawam colors.)

"This league has an opportunity right now to set a standard and make a difference," he said. "I really hope this league takes the opportunity to affect not only the immediate community but the lives of people around the world."

Jacob was asleep hours later when the call came in that the board had decided to use the fair-trade balls, but his mother woke him to deliver the good news.

"I couldn't fall asleep, I was so happy," Jacob said.

Later, Northampton Soccer Club President Tim Stokes said he was impressed by how well-prepared Jacob was. "He really didn't have an 'I don't know' answer to anything," Stokes said. "He clearly had done his homework."

He said the club voted to go ahead and buy the fair-trade balls "because we felt it was the right thing to do."

Since that board meeting, there have been some ups and downs. Jacob's excitement was dampened when he learned that a special-order color scheme would mean a minimum order of 250 balls, way more than what the soccer club had been prepared to order.

But when I last talked with him, he was trying to find a way to pull it off by getting Northampton High School, the city's recreation division and the soccer league to team up on a special order.

"If everyone wanted to order enough, we might be able to get a new color scheme," he said. "That's a possibility."

And so, one city boy experiences that in life, as in sports, there is the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat - and that, in life, as in sports, there is always a possibility.

Laurie Loisel is the Gazette's city editor, and can be reached at lloisel@gazettenet.com.