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.
Up2Us Sports athlete ambassador Kim Vandenberg hosted a swim clinic for 30 girls from long-standing partner ReNew Schaumburg Elementary. The school, in partnership with The New Orleans Recreation Development (NORD) Commission, the American Red Cross and Up2Us Sports, launched their swim program in advance of the 2017-2018 school year. Up2Us Sports placed two coaches in the program to teach students swim skills and life skills throughout the school year.
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.”
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!
Langston Hughes Academy sits just a short distance north of the horse race tracks in the Fairgrounds neighborhood of New Orleans. While it looks different now than it did when Unique Snyder was a child - it was completely renovated after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 - it has the same distinct smell that she vividly remembers.
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