The Up2Us Sports Sneaker Ball is our most significant fundraiser of the year, celebrating the remarkable Up2Us Sports coaches and honorees who are advancing mentorship and altering the trajectory of at-risk youth's lives through sports.
Save the Date for our 10th Annual Gala on Wednesday, May 8, 2024. It will be held at Guastavino’s in New York City from 6:30pm-10:30pm ET. More details coming soon!
We hope you will read our latest Annual Report and we thank you for your support in helping us provide underserved youth with a coach who cares about them. This report covers our 2021-2022 program and fiscal year.
The Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children's Mental Health Innovation Awards—an initiative that aims to identify and fund mental healthcare solutions for children and young adults across the United States—honors a 2022 winner, Up2Us Sports.
Today, January 12th, 2023 is our 13th Anniversary, and we are expecting to have more impact in the year ahead than ever before. We will serve more kids, recruit more coaches, support more VISTAs (front office-based service members) and help more sports-based youth development programs across the country.
Up2Us Sports is proud to celebrate coaches today, and every day. Over the past six years, we have provided 16,000 coaches and youth sport administrators with the training they need to make a lasting impact. We believe that a trained coach can help youth in under-resourced communities succeed on and off the field.
If you know Hemon, working anywhere other than Baltimore was never an option; he sees far too much of himself in these children to go elsewhere. Hemon was born in a refugee camp in Nepal to Bhutanese parents. In 2008, he arrived in Baltimore as a twelve-year-old who couldn’t speak English, but was determined to succeed in his new country.
Through Up2Us Sports’ national coaching program, 350 AmeriCorps members will be trained to coach and mentor low-income youth to make better decisions, stay healthy, and reach their potential, through the power of sports. The $2.5 million in grants from the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) will support AmeriCorps members nationally with added support in California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana and Pennsylvania.
To the kids she coaches Marnisha goes exclusively by ‘Coach Super.’ The moniker doubling as a nickname and the perfect embodiment of her life and commitment to young people. Hearing Marnisha’s story, her nickname becomes less surprising. Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio she grew up in a religious family where both of her parents worked, she went to school, played little league baseball and other sports here and there.
Angel Fulgencio grew up in Oxnard, California just a few hours north of Los Angeles. He is the son of an immigrant family whose parents migrated from Mexico. Growing up, his parents worked hard in the strawberry fields in Oxnard to provide for the family. In high school Angel joined the football team, which was his introduction into sports. Football kept him on the right track and encouraged him to set goals beyond high school.
In two years, Corey Edwards’ goal is to be coaching in the Division I ranks, the highest level of men’s college basketball. For a lot of basketball coaches, ascending to Division I is aspirational at best, but for Corey it feels more like an eventuality. This feeling is born from his lineage and experience in basketball and his dedication to the coaching craft.
Operation Coach is a program of Up2Us Sports that provides veterans with support and professional development while giving back to their community as a coach mentor for underserved youth. AmeriCorps Operation Coach coaches serve as AmeriCorps members for the duration of their service term, which is 900 hours, not to exceed a full year.
In every aspect of her work as a dance coach at ARISE Academy you can see the strategies Chanice learned at the Up2Us Sports training. One example of this is helping kids who struggle to behave by giving them opportunities to matter. “One of [my] students likes to talk back, he likes to talk the entire class so I would have him be the director. He would be standing next to me and I would give him something to do and he would help the other students,” she explained. “Instead of the behavior causing disruptions, they were helping each other. They were learning how to [put] what people would call disruptive behavior to good use.”
Up2Us Coach host sites participate in data collection to measure the benefits of a coach trained in Sports Based Youth Development for youth health and life skills. Data collection includes youth fitness tests (the PACER) and youth surveys measuring the High Impact Attributes, a group of positive attributes connected to the sport experience and to positive life outcomes. Up2Us Sports would like to recognize the four Up2Us Coach host sites below for collecting high quality data and achieving great results for their youth!
The most important factor in a young person’s life is whether or not they have positive adult relationships. Nobody knows this better than Maria Gomez. Maria joined her family in the United States after being born in Guatemala when she was in second grade. A transition which on its own is challenging, but coupled with her father’s arrest and later his deportation caused Maria to get angry. This trauma had profound effects on her, as at an early age she began to have run-ins with the law. This trouble continued for a prolonged stretch and easily could have endured if something did not change in her life.
Patrick credits ROTC as the biggest influence in his life and he aspires to pass on the values it instilled in him to the kids he is now coaching, who have become his biggest inspiration. The experience - both as a volunteer and now as a full-time coach - has also helped Patrick put things into perspective and move on from the loss of his dream.
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![[WATCH] Morgan Stanley Innovation Awards Features Up2Us Sports](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58bddd12e58c6278e8a670e2/551e2744-c233-46e6-850d-bac0223d8f13/MHA+Innovation+Feb+2023+1.jpg)
