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.
The veteran empowerment organization Got Your 6 launched a new PSA, #ShesBadass, to continue celebrating the accomplishments of women veterans. Up2Us Sports would like to highlight a couple of the amazing female coaches who serve their communities through our Operation Coach program.
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.
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.”
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