Coach Kelli is all about healing—for the kids they mentor, their community, and themself. Both on and off the basketball court, Kelli integrates their interests in wellness, relationship-building, and social justice in order to build on sports’ potential as a healing modality. Having served as an Up2Us Sports YES Grant coach for the past year, Coach Kelli is preparing to start their second year with ReNEW SciTech Academy in New Orleans. 

The YES Initiative (Youth Engagement in Sports: Collaboration to Improve Adolescent Physical Activity and Nutrition) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and managed by the Office of Minority Health, awarded funding to 16 national organizations, including Up2Us Sports’ COACHES Project. Based in New Orleans, COACHES partnered with three ReNEW Charter Schools, including SciTech Academy. 

In this past year at SciTech, Coach Kelli mentored and coached basketball to pre-K through 8th grade students. Kelli came to Up2Us Sports after serving with City Year, and between a lifelong involvement in basketball and their interest in trauma-sensitive coaching, they were a natural fit with Up2Us Sports. Even before Kelli was coaching, they were applying themes from the basketball court to daily life, using the concept of training reps and drills to help ground them and find the next move in moments of uncertainty. Transitioning into the role of coach, Kelli was able to draw from personal experience using sports, exercise, and embodiment as wellness tools, and to share these tools with student athletes.

Coach Kelli approaches coaching with one major priority: to build trusting relationships with their students. At SciTech, this meant communicating with their young athletes consistently and encouraging them to do the same, finding small moments to connect and check in outside of practice, and learning how to “read in between the lines” when kids struggled to speak directly. By getting to know each individual’s body language and mannerisms, Kelli could decipher the bottom line and help students express their thoughts and needs. 

Listening was an important part of this strategy. Coach Kelli listened to their youths’ needs and met students where they were before getting into anything basketball or training-related. Kelli realized that their students came to the team for a variety of reasons secondary to the actual game of basketball. “Some of my players are here to play basketball, some of my players are here to make friends, some of my players are here to gain self-confidence. One common theme was that a lot of them came to build friendships, so I made sure to try to intersect that when it came to different drills or floor practice, doing different icebreakers, things of that nature. I think it’s extremely important.”

The Up2Us Sports curriculum has proven to be useful in Coach Kelli’s own life, so they can wholeheartedly endorse its principles and methods to the youth they serve. The Up2Us Sports coach training has helped Kelli to be more compassionate with themself, to create positive practices, and to have a growth mindset. These are tools that Kelli shared and reinforced with their student athletes, hoping that they would remember these lessons after their time together was over. “[I always remind them to] pay attention to what’s around you, use what’s around you. I challenged them to think from an abundance perspective instead of what they don’t have.”  

In focusing on creating a safe group dynamic and building relationships and trust through physical activity, Coach Kelli is subtly reshaping the role of youth sports programming—turning towards a more holistic approach in which trust and camaraderie, as well as both mental and physical well-being, are the foundation of team sports. Coach Kelli is looking beyond trauma-sensitive coaching towards the potential for healing and wellness that a great sports coach can facilitate. “My experience with Up2Us Sports as a coach led me to realize I can be fruitful and productive and effective and impactful not only for myself, [but] for my community and my youth, by doing wellness work. I think the trauma-sensitive curriculum is just the tip of the iceberg.”      

Coach Kelli has been serving as an Up2Us Sports coach since August 2019 at ReNEW SciTech Academy in New Orleans thanks to support from the Office of Health and Human Services YES initiative grant.