Up2Us Sports marks 15 years of empowering youth through sports and unveils a rebrand to expand its impact.
AmeriCorps announced that Up2Us Sports would once again receive critical funding for our national service coach program. Since 2009, AmeriCorps funding has allowed us to train and support over 3,900 coaches to significantly impact the lives of nearly 100,000 young people.
Welcome to a momentous occasion as we celebrate 14 incredible years of Up2Us Sports! Since our inception, we have been committed to empowering young people through the power of sports, national service and mentorship.
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.
A Tennessee native, Ebbert attended a magnet school where playing a sport was required. She dabbled in all sorts of sports and thrived off the life skills she learned along the way. Her older brother attended NYU and on a visit, she fell in love with the city and knew she wanted to attend college there.
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.”
Women's History Month is held annually in March to highlight the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society. It started with the first International Women’s Day in 1911, grew to National Women’s History Week in 1980 and was officially recognized in it’s current form in 1988. We believe that sports history is also worth celebrating this month, particularly the historic and impactful achievements of female athletes. They have been winning medals, setting records, and smashing the glass ceiling for decades. Up2Us Sports works with six female ambassadors who have all made their mark on their respective sports, and each hold a small - or in some cases, large - piece of history.
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.
Claire Perry knows a thing or two about being a great coach. The Philadelphia native grew up in a household of five where she was not only the youngest, but was also expected to keep up. Perry dedicated her life to basketball at an early age, playing on an all-boys team while being coached in the sport by her father. She credits her parents and siblings for the person she is now—a coach, a mother and Mid-Atlantic regional director (Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC regions) for .Up2Us Sports, a non-profit organization that improves the lives of vulnerable youth by training coaches to inspire children through sport and life.
On February 1st, we celebrate the 31st anniversary of National Girls & Women in Sports Day, a national observance celebrating the extraordinary achievements of women and girls in sports. The theme this year is Expanding Opportunity. It recognizes the extraordinary progress sparked by Title IX and the ongoing effort to ensure access to sports togirls and women. Despite the legislation’s impact, only 40% of high school girls are currently playing sports, leaving three-in-five girls without the opportunity to compete.
Up2Us Sports Chief Program Officer Megan Bartlett will be leading a workshop on using sports to address trauma with Lou Bergholz and Sean Rose on May 31, 2017 at the 28th Annual International Trauma Conference in Boston. More information on the workshop below.
Workshop Title:
Harnessing Your Competitive Spirit: Physical activity, trauma-sensitive coaching, league-level play, and the intervention methodologies that are shaping sports-based stabilization
Workshop Overview:
Interested in a healing medium rooted in competency, self-regulation, identity, physical activity, rituals, routines, and pro-social connection? Then you are interested in the unique role that sport can play in healing. This pre-conference, on the emerging field of sports-based stabilization, will bring together practitioners from the clinical and sport worlds to examine the ways in which sport can be shaped into a therapeutic modality. Participants will spend the day exploring the key elements of the sports-based stabilization framework: unlocking the power of physical activity; learning the skills of a trauma-sensitive coach; and, embedding the core therapeutic elements into the sport experience to create a league that promotes healing. By participating in a sport training session, participants will learn firsthand the elements of a trauma-sensitive warm-up, how to build competency through sport drills, and the hidden opportunities that exist in sport to facilitate therapeutic conversations. Leading practitioners in the field of sports will further bring these elements to life through stories that describe the impact of their work in sport and trauma. Participants will leave with a “playbook” of design principles and techniques that can be integrated into any intervention, but are ideally used to build a trauma-sensitive sports league.
This pre-conference will be active and is designed for maximum accessibility. No previous sport experience is required and participants of all abilities are welcome. Comfortable clothing and athletic shoes strongly recommended.
SPEAKERS
Lou Bergholz Chief Knowledge Officer Edgework Consulting
Lou has been working on the frontlines of youth development for over two decades, from residential treatment centers to camps working with children infected and affected by HIV. The Edgework team is dedicated to working with organizations, and communities to help them solve their complex people problems. For close to 15 years Edgework has been creating trauma-informed interventions in the US and abroad that apply academic research and clinical practice to populations without reliable access to definitive clinical care.
Sean M. Rose, M.Ed. Executive Director JRI Connecticut
Sean has more than 22 years of experience in education, treatment, and mental health with families, children, and adolescents. He has held various leadership roles in the public and non-profit sectors, and has successfully partnered with state and local government to advocate for and serve youth with complex trauma, mental health, and behavioral health issues. Over his career, Sean has successfully managed programs aimed at enabling youth to develop to their full potential, from residential to recreational. Most recently, Sean was appointed as the Executive Director for Justice Resource Institute’s Connecticut division. He earned a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Lesley University and was awarded a master’s degree in education and school administration from American International College.
Megan Bartlett, MA Chief Program Officer Up2Us Sports
Megan has spent her career working in, designing, and advocating for programs that use sport as a tool for positive youth development. At Up2Us Sports, she helped build the first national service program placing coaches as mentors for youth in underserved communities, and created the innovative training program that has provided thousands of coaches with the tools to take a trauma-sensitive approach to sport. She has extensive experience working directly with youth as a college and youth soccer coach, camp director, and in community mental health. Megan earned a MA in Urban Policy and Planning from Tufts University and a BA in Psychology and Sociology from Wesleyan University.
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.
On September 23, 2016, Up2Us Sports launched a CrowdRise campaign with the goal of raising $100,000 in 100 days to support our Operation Coach program. Thanks to the generosity of nearly 300 donors and the continued support of ESPN, we have raised $146,304 to support returning veterans.
NATIONAL SPONSORS
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