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.
With an increasingly diverse population, there are a host of opportunities and potential challenges when it comes to youth sports in the United States. For some sports, we continue to see increased participation because members of previously underrepresented groups are now being invited and encouraged to participate.
As a college professor, I often find myself talking to students about the value of networking, especially in the field of sport management, my area of expertise. My colleagues are in agreement that building a network, starting at least in college, is a good strategy when trying to find an internship or a full-time position.
Our goals for the long-term health of our society, especially young people, include having more individuals participate in (more) sports. Not just basketball, baseball, football, hockey, soccer, tennis or golf. It includes ultimate frisbee, lacrosse, rugby 7s, T20 cricket, Quidditch, professional tag, and pickleball, amongst others.
In the past seven years, I have highlighted in the Sports Doing Good newsletter and blog more than 4,000 stories of the “good.” This has included everything from on-the-field performances, work by non-profits, team and league programs reaching out to their fan bases, and of course, people overcoming challenges in their lives, big and small, to accomplish something important in their life. For this last category of stories, it is fair to think when overcoming “challenges,” we are talking about those physical in nature. Those are the ones that are the most obvious – someone’s physical challenge – is usually very easy to see. But, of course, it is not all about the physical.
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.
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![[WATCH] Morgan Stanley Innovation Awards Features Up2Us Sports](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58bddd12e58c6278e8a670e2/551e2744-c233-46e6-850d-bac0223d8f13/MHA+Innovation+Feb+2023+1.jpg)
