The 17 girls who play for the Starlings Volleyball Club in Toledo, Ohio, aren't old enough to drive a car.

Many of the players' families couldn't afford one, either, even if the girls were of age.

Still, the pair of teams learned a hard lesson about the rising price of fuel and the slumping economy.

Determined to cover the cost of their third consecutive trip to San Diego for the Starlings National Tournament this week, the girls held a skills clinic at a local grade school, sold popcorn at a school dance and spent their weekends washing cars and baking cookies that were sold to hungry patients in the office of their club director and coach, Dr. Richard Paat.

“Volleyball teaches the girls about life,” said Paat, who with his wife Myra serve as volunteer coaches. “Everybody is a little tired (after traveling), but for some of the girls, it's the first time they've flown. A lot of the girls had never seen an ocean. I'm glad we could give these girls this experience.”

The girls have focused beyond simply fundraising for themselves. Packed with their jerseys, sneakers and knee pads is a duffel bag of medical supplies and medicine that will stay in San Diego.

Eventually, the bag will make its way to Casa de los Pobres, a center that provides food, medical care and educational training to the poor in Tijuana. The bag will be followed by a shipment of desperately needed food.

“(Helping Casa) teaches our girls that other people, other cultures don't have as much as they do,” Richard Paat said.

Added Marisa Paat, the Toledo 16s setter: “By sending rice and other food, we know we're helping girls our age.”

The program in Toledo is run by volunteers like the Paats. In exchange for the team's practice time at an inner-city gym, Richard Paat donates his time at a mobile medical clinic.

Providing medical care to those who can't afford it is the calling of Paat, who leads medical missions all over the world through the University of Toledo.

Paat took a team to tsunami-ravaged Indonesia in 2004, and was one of the first on the ground in Biloxi after Hurricane Katrina. Paat takes teams regularly to Honduras and Guatemala. He has visited the Philippines and has plans to go to Tanzania.

“Once he sets his mind to doing something, he'll do it no matter what,” Marisa Paat said of her father. “It makes me proud.”

Starlings Executive Director Byron Shewman, who introduced Paat to Casa de los Pobres, served as a translator on one of the trips to Guatemala and saw firsthand the passion Paat has for his patients.

“He's one of the most amazing people I've ever met,” said Shewman, who co-founded the Starlings program in 1996 with a team at Lincoln High. “I don't think he ever sleeps.”

With the Toledo Starlings already committed to helping the poor of Tijuana through Youth Without Borders, an outreach organization also run by Shewman, Paat is building a partnership between the University of Toledo's medical school and the struggling medical clinic run through Casa de los Pobres.

His goal is to see UT medical students partner with the school's alumni living in San Diego and volunteer doctors to provide medical care at Casa de los Pobres.

“We can keep (Casa's) clinic alive and teach the student about other cultures,” Paat said. “It's a wonderful learning opportunity.”

Nicole Vargas: (619) 293-1390; nicole.vargas@uniontrib.com