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.
This spring, Up2Us Sports is excited to roll out a new set of content focused on sports-based youth development program design, program quality, and evaluation. Targeted at program directors and program staff designing youth sports programs, this nation-wide launch includes new training events at every major regional Up2Us Sports hub during the month of April.
More than seven years ago, I wrote two articles for SportsBusiness Journal that were published within 5 months of each other. They dealt with the areas of sport and social responsibility and social entrepreneurship. The feedback was very positive and I was encouraged by many to start a blog on those topics. The thing was, at the time, I was not a fan of blogs and questioned their value when it came to being a forum for intelligent information exchange. Well, I was wrong.
The Up2Us Sports AmeriCorps VISTA program, now in its eighth year, is a critical part of this effort.Each year, a cohort of roughly 30 Up2Us Sports AmeriCorps VISTA members are placed at member organizations all over the country and commit one year of their lives to service through sports. They mobilize community members, build partnerships, recruit and manage volunteers and help their organizations raise funds for program growth.
During her senior year at CUNY City College in New York City, Wendolyn Ebbert decided she wanted to join the Peace Corps after she graduated. She was majoring in International Studies and felt compelled to go abroad and make a difference in the lives of those in need around the world.
VISTA’s find out about the year-long, national service program in many different ways. For Sheryl Katz, she didn’t even know what VISTA was until after she had her heart set on working for Kids in the Game. She was working full-time at a law firm doing marketing when she realized it just wasn’t for her. “I wanted to work with youth who had backgrounds similar to myself - active, sports-driven childhoods,” said Katz.
Born and raised in New York City, Banks stayed local and attended Brooklyn College where she studied theatre. It was while there that she discovered her passion for working with youth. In a class she was asked, “what can you do when you’re not pursuing an acting role?” She realized then that she loved being around children and listening to them.
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.
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