Up2Us Sports Wins $50,000 in Gatorade Contest

It was announced on July 24th that Up2Us Sports won Round 1 of Gatorade’s For The Love Of SportsTM contest. As the winning nonprofit organization, they will receive a $50,000 donation from Gatorade. The campaign features sponsored athletes Usain Bolt, Elena Delle Donne, Paul George, April Ross and Serena Williams, who are all competing at the upcoming 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Up2Us Sports won Round 1 of the contest by receiving 42% of total votes received during the six-week open voting period. Competing nonprofits included National Alliance for Youth Sports (40%), PeacePlayers International (10%) and Challenged Athletes Foundation (8%). Up2Us Sports is grateful for the incredible support of their constituents, family, friends and, most importantly, staff, who worked tirelessly to get this victory. With this donation, the national nonprofit will be able to provide more coach-mentors to kids living in some of the most disadvantaged communities across the country.

The contest includes a total of fourteen nonprofits, competing in four rounds, with the winner of each round receiving a $50,000 donation. Additionally, each non-winning charity will receive $5,000, totaling $300,000 in donations towards youth sports organizations fueling the love of sports. The contest ends on November 30th.

Coach Tempest: Squash Provides Relief and Opportunity

Tempest Bowden started at the bottom. Literally. “I grew up in West Philly, in a neighborhood called ‘The Bottom.’ Most people don’t know it was called ‘The Bottom’ because of where it was located in relation to a river, but a lot of people call it ‘The Bottom’ because it was the hood - it was the ghetto. It was a hard life. As a kid, you are kind of blind to it and don’t see it, but I grew up in that.” Tempest and her younger sister, Quineta, grew up poor and often didn’t have lights or gas or food.

By the age of 12, Tempest had entered a very rebellious stage. She shares, “I was not really good with adult figures because I was used to my mom making empty promises and I didn’t trust anybody. It was rough.” Enter Julie Williams, [now former] Executive Director of SquashSmarts - a nonprofit, after-school program that supports kids on the court and in the classroom. Williams introduced the sport of squash to Tempest in her gym class. “Squash was one thing that helped me to gain some sort of balance. A place where I could go and relieve stress because I didn't understand my life. Sometimes being hungry was frustrating and going to squash practice to get that frustration out and get a snack at the same time was really good.” Squash had become her outlet.

Tempest spent almost every day in the program for six years. In the fall of 2009, she headed to Mount Holyoke College, where she continued to play squash at the NCAA Division-III level. After a series of tragedies, Tempest left Mount Holyoke and returned home. She didn’t know what she should do next, until she discovered City Year. “It was the most amazing experience I ever had because that’s when I knew I wanted to work with kids. Immediately, I knew I needed to work with kids, especially inner-city kids.”

On a return visit to SquashSmarts in 2015, and six years after leaving as a student at the organization, Tempest was offered a role as a Coach Across America coach. To begin her service as a Coach Across America coach, she attended the Up2Us Sports National Coach Training Institute in Boston. There, coaches are taught how to coach sports and teach life skills, in what is called sports-based youth development (SBYD). They are trained how to work specifically with children who come from disadvantaged communities and who have, or are, experiencing high levels of stress and trauma in their lives - something that hit close to home for Tempest.

“My favorite part of the training is the day we talked about the brain, the impact of stress and how sport can be that perfect outlet for kids to become their better selves”

“My favorite part of the training is the day we talked about the brain, the impact of stress and how sport can be that perfect outlet for kids to become their better selves,” she shared. She knows squash has helped her become her better self. “The more I played squash and pushed myself I knew I was not going to be done with squash. I knew I was going to be doing it for my life. Honestly, it’s the most consistent thing in my life.”

Tempest left the training with a strong desire to keep working hard and improving as a coach. “I know squash very well and the training I got with Up2Us Sports fine tuned everything that I needed to be the coach I am today. Learning how to be a trauma-sensitive coach, learning about the High Impact Attributes, things like that really helped me to connect with my kids on a greater level.”

On June 15, 2016, Up2Us Sports honored Tempest as the Coach of the Year at their annual Gala in New York City. On July 31, 2016, Tempest will finish her one-year term as a Coach Across America coach, but her time with SquashSmarts will not end. She will continue as a full-time employee, serving as the Director of Squash and Fitness for their middle school program.

“2016 has been an amazing year for me. It really opened my eyes to my potential. People used to tell me all the time, ‘Tempest, you have so much potential!’ and I didn't believe them. I would just play [squash] and that was my thing. Now I can see it and I feel it. It feels really good to have that feeling, to know that you are doing something positive. It really pushes you to be your best self.”

It certainly sounds like Tempest has made her way from “The Bottom” to the top.

FOR SALE: Baseball Bat Signed by Giancarlo Stanton, Winner of the 2016 Home Run Derby

Support Up2Us Sports by purchasing a baseball bat autographed by current Miami Marlins' right fielder, Giancarlo Stanton. Stanton was the winner of the 2016 Home Run Derby, and holds the record for most home runs in the competition. Drafted in 2007, Stanton is a three-time MLB All-Star and the 2014 Hank Aaron Award winner for the National League for most home runs. Buy now: $400

Donated by: Miami Marlins

RESTRICTIONS:  Shipping included.  No refunds, exchanges, or returns.

Up2Us Sports Receives $1.8 Million in National and State AmeriCorps Grants

Funding will support AmeriCorps members to bring sports­-based youth development education to underserved communities. Up2Us Sports has received $1.8 million in AmeriCorps grants, one National and four state, from the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) to support hundreds of AmeriCorps members. Through Up2Us Sports’ Coach Across America program, AmeriCorps members will be trained to coach and mentor low­ income youth to make good decisions and stay healthy, through the power of sports. The grants will support AmeriCorps members nationally with added support in Illinois, Louisiana, California and Pennsylvania.

“AmeriCorps is an indispensable resource to help meet critical challenges facing our communities and nation,” said Paul Caccamo, founder and CEO of Up2Us Sports. "We're thrilled that the Corporation for National and Community Service has recognized the value that their members serving with Up2Us Sports can and will offer to communities across the country.”

“AmeriCorps members make a powerful impact on the toughest challenges facing our nation,” said Wendy Spencer, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that administers AmeriCorps. “As they serve others, AmeriCorps members will also expand opportunity for themselves ­gaining skills and experience to jumpstart their careers. We congratulate Up2Us Sports for their strong application, and thank all AmeriCorps members for their service.”

In addition to the grant funding, CNCS will make available over $900,000 in education scholarships for the AmeriCorps members funded by these grants to help pay for college, vocational training, or pay back student loans. After completing 1,700 hours of service, AmeriCorps members earn an education award of $5,775.

AmeriCorps operates as a public-­private partnership that leverages significant amounts of outside resources to stretch the federal dollar and increase community impact. This grant will generate an additional $2.5 million in national and local matching support and other outside resources from businesses, foundations, and other organizations.  AmeriCorps engages more than 75,000 members in intensive service annually to serve through nonprofit, faith­based, and community organizations at more than 21,000 locations across the country. These members help communities tackle pressing problems while mobilizing millions of volunteers for the organizations they serve.

Since 1994, 980,000 AmeriCorps members have given more than 1.3 billion hours of service to their country, earning more than $3 billion in education scholarships. Later this year, the one millionth AmeriCorps member will take the AmeriCorps pledge, committing to "get things done" for America.

The Benefits of Stress: How Up2Us Sports is Redefining the Role of Competition, for Good

Up2Us Sports’ Healthy Competition Module is Changing the Way Coaches and Athletes Learn from Stressful Situations

By: Bryan Kitch for SportUp

Let’s face it: Competition gets a bad wrap these days. And it’s easy to understand why. The world of youth sports has long suffered the strains of difficult coach-parent relationships, of misplaced dreams about athletic prowess, and of undue pressures on growing minds. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

And that’s where Up2Us Sports’ thoughtful approach to coaching comes in.

 

Part 1: Coach Across America

“Because we run this program where we place coaches into organizations all over the country, one of the first challenges was figuring out how to make sure that they were well trained,” explains Megan Bartlett, Chief Program Officer with Up2Us Sports. “And, because we care a lot about the coaches we train coming from the communities in which they’re working, the organizations (for the most part) choose their coaches, and then send them to us to be trained, and supported throughout the year. So we offset the cost of their salaries, pay them, and support them in their work within their organization.”

That’s all background on Up2Us Sports’ main initiative, Coach Across America, which has helped a large number of communities throughout the United States. A key question facing the Up2Us Sports team, then, was what could be considered general knowledge, and how could it be tailored to suit the needs of each, individual community? It forced them to think about what universal lessons could be taught, regardless of the packaging (that is, the sport through which the lessons were to be learned).

“What we found, however, was that there was more overlap than we originally thought,” Bartlett says. “There’s a greater ability for people to take a more general lesson and apply it to their specific context, in the right way, than we thought there might be.” Still, that doesn’t mean it’s always an easy transition—coaches attending trainings are encouraged to talk about their circumstances as a way for them to start connecting the dots, and learn how they’ll be able to put their new knowledge to good use at home.

“We’ll say, spend the next five minutes talking to your partner about your story, and how you might use [this lesson] there, so that we can give folks the opportunity to say, ‘I’m not buying it,’ or ‘this won’t work for me.’ That way, people have been more open to trying it, and we’ve been more flexible—we’re not saying, ‘do this exact thing all the time.’”

So, what are some of the universal lessons that stick out for Bartlett from the training?

“One of them is that relationships matter,” says Bartlett. “You have to have some skills to form relationships with kids. It’s not just that some people are better at working with kids—there are actual, hard skills and things that you can do to form relationships with kids, even if you’re not immediately gifted that way. You could be great with kids, and there will still be some children that are difficult for you to connect with, either because you don’t have a shared interest, or because they’ve got something going on in their lives that makes it more difficult for them to connect with you.”

She continues: “I think with coaches, people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to develop those skills—they think that just the shared interest in say, volleyball, will be enough to sustain the relationship.”

First and foremost, one of the things that Up2Us Sports stresses is that behavior is just that—behavior. It’s not definitive, and it can change. It’s also not a great indicator of intention.

“What we find is that kids who have a lot of stress in other parts of their lives develop behaviors to cope with that stress that are not always adaptive,” Bartlett says. “But, there’s a perfectly good reason why they have that coping strategy. It may come off to us as a coach as being obstinate, but actually, the kid needs to develop behavioral skills for all contexts. So, we look at everything as skill-building.”

That works for sports because if there is one demographic that is adept at learning and building skills, it’s coaches. “Taking small steps, and structuring activities so that you’re always adding a little bit more—whether you’re trying to perfect your foul shooting or whatever it may be—is exactly what’s needed to build relationships, and behaviors.”

Building relationships, building culture, building competence—all three are a process of small gains, of concrete steps. It takes a lot of discipline to become a good athlete, and coaches who understand the universal quality of this process as a means to success on and off the court are invaluable to the athletes under their guidance.

“If good coaches make clear connections about these skills, where kids might be able to use them in other parts of their lives, then you’ve really capitalized on the potential benefit of sports for an educational outcome—it’s different from saying we’re going to make you do the education side so that you can play sports. No, there’s actually a really cool link—kids who have learned the skill of discipline can also be taught that that skill is transferable to other parts of their lives.”

It’s that level of in-depth consideration that defines the Coach Across America program as a whole, and hints at how they’ve been able to build such an effective curriculum.

Part 2: Pushing Competition Forward

“Youth sports get a really bad wrap about a lot of things,” says Caitlin Barrett, Director of Training at Up2Us Sports, “and competition is a huge piece of that—I think that so often we respond to examples of really harsh, or poorly managed competition with the idea of ‘let’s just play for fun, we’re not going to keep score, everyone gets a trophy.’ And I think that in that response, we really lose a lot of the core to what sports are, and how sports can help prepare us for the higher stakes situations in life.”

Up2Us Sports already partners with a number of organizations who embrace this philosophy about competition, but this teaching module—a core component of their broader coaching curriculum—is among the most important, in Barrett’s opinion.

“I think it’s an entry point [for people unfamiliar with Up2Us Sports]. I think that folks who might have a more old-school mindset, who have a more traditional youth sports mindset, this module can meet them where they are and bring them into thinking about sports in a different way. People hear about us, and think that we must be ‘kumbaya sports,’ kids just play to have fun, etc.—but we aren’t.”

Once again, it’s a careful approach and thoughtful background that leads to results for Up2Us Sports.

“You might be trying to develop elite athletes, and you might find that they’re unable to handle the most intense moments—how can you as a coach be more intentional about preparing them for those moments, in much the same way as you prepare them with plays, with strategy, with individual or team skills?” Barrett asks, rhetorically.

Without a doubt, competition is stressful. But, when framed the right way, it’s a way to experience and learn how to deal with stressors without ‘life and death’ consequences—experience and training for real life situations, those ‘higher stakes’ moments that Barrett mentioned earlier.

“We know that 70% of kids drop out of sports by middle school,” Barrett says, “and I think that’s because we tend to view readiness for competition, and variety of other sports skills, as ‘either you have it or you don’t’—you look at the kid who ‘has it’ and then at those who don’t, and you say well maybe sports aren’t for them. But then, you lose this extremely protective experience for kids, both in terms of their physical healthy and their connections to others.”

Barrett, formerly of America SCORES New York, is herself a lifelong athlete, having played soccer from a young age, but also has a strong interest in teaching—in many ways, Up2Us Sports has been the perfect lens for her to focus her energies, combining her passion for sports with education. So much of the Up2Us Sports program is about approaching everything as a student. Hence, the interactive, classroom nature of their presentations.

“We do a little bit of presenting the relevant research, but in general we are working with coaches that tend to be on the younger side—they like to educate through games and activities, so we like to do that as well.

“The Healthy Competition Module starts with a game, and moves into an additional activity that gets coaches to think about how they’re most comfortable, in terms of how competition is structured,” Barrett explains.

This can take the form of trying to keep a beach ball in the air with your team, then adding counting (how many taps can you record in a row, keeping the beach ball in the air) to introduce a level of competition within the team, and finally adding competition against other teams.

“It gets them to think about how they respond to these different rounds,” she says.

As they move through the spectrum, they internalize the psychological changes that take place at each level of competition. And this helps illustrate the emotional continuum that young athletes face, while simultaneously giving the coaches the tools to guide them through it.

“That’s a really telling example of how we run these sessions—we’re going to do something, and then really debrief about it, not only as you experienced it while you were playing, but also as you look toward getting back to your program with your kids.”

Part 3: The Coach's Perspective

“Sometimes you don’t have to say to kids that they’re competing—the focus can be within the group, just trying to work together,” says Up2Us Sports Coach Across America coach at Legacy Youth Tennis and Education in Philadelphia, Hashaan Freeman. It may be a cliché, but thinking outside the box is an important part of Freeman’s approach to coaching, both from the standpoint of competition, as well as that of mentoring and connecting with kids.

“We’ve found non-traditional ways to be competitive,” he says. “Through working with kids, you get to know them, you start to understand what their context is, at home, or in the classroom. You get familiar in just kind of an organic sense. But there are ways we use specifically to check in with kids—a lot of non-verbal communication so that they don’t have to be super expressive, or reminded of their stressors. So, we’ll do a number of fingers, or hand signals throughout a practice session—I may check in about four times with individual kids during the course of that session. They can give me a number, or a signal that we both agreed on that will tell me something—I’m a tennis coach, so I’m always taking advantage of the informal time, when we’re done hitting, picking up balls, that’s when I can check in individually with kids, just allowing them to be themselves, with the understanding that this is not life or death.”

For Freeman, a 12-year coach, it’s about creating an environment where kids can choose how expressive they want to be; where kids can, in a sense, experiment with their own behaviors to find what works for them within the context of sports; and where kids can learn lessons about how to work through difficulties and make good decisions.

“These trainings have been wonderful—they’re great as soft reminders. Coach Across America and Up2Us Sports, their big focus is on research into how kids handle stress, and ultimately just being intentional with kids. When I’m working with kids, I’m open in that yes, I’m trying to figure you out: When are you comfortable, what are you struggling with, what are your strong sports skills, what are your strong life skills—just intentionally highlight these things over, and over again. And I think what’s most important is that these young people’s positive qualities are highlighted in front of their peers.”

What does he mean by that?

“There’s this competitive, urban thing—they might come from the same area, the same circumstances, but everybody wants to be better than the person that’s standing next to them,” he says. “But we’re trying to build more of a community sense, where we’re learning this sport together, we’re learning about life together, and we need to have each other’s backs.”

This is a lesson that really hits home for Freeman, who credits a social worker, who organized trips for the kids in the apartment complex where he grew up, with introducing him to the sport of tennis at what was then called the Arthur Ashe Youth Tennis and Education Center in Philadelphia. He progressed in the sport quickly, and loved the structure that it brought to his life.

“I was comfortable with the coaches, and understood their intent—they wanted to make sure that tennis ‘made my life,’ is how they might put it,” he says. “It was a lifestyle change for me—and it has helped me throughout my life.”

He went on to play at the DII/DIII level at Lincoln University. And now, he’s making the same difference for the next generation.

“When you’re that young, and making your own decisions, you might make some foolish ones—maybe you don’t have the backing in your household to redirect you, which is a constant reality for children growing up in urban settings,” he explains.

The choice that Freeman made, and those of his core group of friends, to use the sport as a lens through which to see and map out a different path for themselves, has paid lasting dividends, and the bonds that he formed with those friends have lasted, as well.

“I have a core group that stuck with it alongside me—we’ve been doing this since 1997. And within the next couple weeks, we’ll be meeting back up to plan our summer program.”

While some might not view tennis—in many cases, a one-on-one competition—as the ideal sport to build teamwork and camaraderie, Freeman views it differently.

“It’s funny, because I feel that I’m truly, truly blessed with the sport that I’ll say has chosen me, but I get the chance to build individuals first,” he says. “I’m a big believer that if we are stronger as individuals—if I have kids that can stand on their own, make their own decisions—then that will form a better team.

“Look at the whole line of integrity with tennis: If you can’t get to a ball, but the ball was in, hit by your opponent on the other side of the net, then you have to call it in because you have to be honest. You have to suck it up and move on to the next point.”

The whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, but that doesn’t mean that looking after each part of the whole is a waste of time—in fact, quite the opposite: it means building from the ground up.

“I have individual student-athletes in front of me that can hold their own, says Freeman. “Then, when I bring you guys together, when the collective is brought into play, I feel like I can’t lose.”

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This piece was written by Bryan Kitch for SportUp’s blog. SportUp is an activity management and analytics tools that provides actionable insights for teams and groups.

Changing the Game: Sport System Re-Design

Improving the quality of the sport experience for the participant has typically been accomplished through two main approaches: coach education and use of curriculum (activities and materials). However in our observation and work with a wide range of youth sports programs, we have found an exciting third approach. We have termed it Sport System Re-Design (SSRD). In many ways, SSRD is not a new concept. There is not a sport that exists that has not gone through some type of re-design since its inception, as we discussed above. Furthermore, elements of SSRD have been central parts of the physical education, adaptive physical education and the sport pedagogy scenes for many decades. In its most basic form, SSRD involves looking at the core elements of the actual sport experience and purposefully altering some element of that experience in order to get a specific desired outcome. While SSRD may work in concert with a curriculum, and certainly would utilize a level of coach training, it is distinct in its methodology. Simply stated, SSRD is the creative and intentional tinkering with one or more parts of the game or sport system to positively impact the outcomes for youth and other participants.

It is exciting for us to know that there are programs, leagues, practitioners and academics who are actively thinking about changing a sport system, specifically to achieve youth development outcomes through sport. We believe we are at the beginning of something important and far-reaching. It’s been validating and invigorating to meet people who are doing work in this area. Some are pure frontline practitioners, such as Street Soccer USA and Magic Bus. Others are major governing bodies of sport, such as as the International Rugby Board/World Ruby and USA Hockey. And others are researches and academics, such as the team of Burton, Gillham and Hammermeister (2011). They have been developing and researching a methodology called Competitive Engineering, which parallels our work in Sport System Re-Design. Their work is particularly important, we think, because of their focus on assessing outcomes. The idea and approach of re-Design becomes more legitimized in the eyes of more people when there are more people writing, researching and talking about it in a rigorous way.

To the many people working on re-Design in their own ways, we hope to be able to use this book as a platform to rally interested parties together. We are at the beginning of something that is becoming a community of practice (Lace & Wenger, 1991), a group of people who share an interest or passion or goal, and who jointly take part in activities around that interest. For some, it may become a legitimate area of research and study. For others, it will be a productive approach to solving problems in their work. It may even spread globally as a movement to advance youth development in sport.

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This is an excerpt from "Re-Designing Youth Sport: Changing the Game" a book by Up2Us Sports' Megan Bartlett and her co-authors John McCarthy from Boston University and Lou Bergholz of Edgework Consulting.  Click here to purchase and use promo code IRK71 to save 20%.