There are a ton of benefits for kids and teens who play sports and engage in other types of outdoor and physical recreation. The physical benefits are obvious—getting outside and exercising your body is good for your physical health. It allows you to grow muscle strength, gain endurance, encourages healthy bone growth, and helps to keep your heart healthy. And for younger kids especially, participating in athletics helps to develop important motor skills as they regularly catch and throw balls, run, and jump.[1]
But there is much more to youth sports than even the physical benefits! Team sports helps to develop important lifelong social skills. You have to cooperate and collaborate with your teammates, listen to your coaches, and even have some opportunities to try out leadership roles yourself by doing things like leading the team in a drill, helping and encouraging your teammates, or taking on a role as a team captain. Sports can also give kids valuable lessons in self discipline and teach them how rewarding perseverance can be as they have to practice certain skills, like a serve in volleyball for example, to get better at them. There’s nothing like finally mastering something that you had been struggling with, finally spiking that ball over the net or making that jumpshot.
One of our goals at Community Chest is to reach more kids in Portland with our sports and athletics, so that more youth in communities of color can reap the rewards. Currently, most of our programs are run out of De La Salle North Catholic High School, and we have done basketball, football, baseball, and volleyball programs. We even have our own Northeast Portland Athletic Sports Organization that mainly focuses on girl’s volleyball. We hope to soon expand to more stereotypically “white” sports as well, like lacrosse and rugby, to keep expanding the options and opportunities for the youth in our programs to try out and engage in. You never know what sport you may fall in love with if you just try it, and we hope that engaging in sports early on will help the youth in our programs to develop a lifelong passion for sports and being active.
Youth sports can and should be a lot of fun! We work hard to make sure that any of our athletic programs are sources of fun and stress relief for both the youth and their parents. We work to make the teams themselves welcoming environments so that those who join can feel comfortable and enjoy themselves, and we don’t put heavy cost burdens on families to be able to afford sports equipment or pay for annual membership fees like private sports clubs would.
If you’re thinking of joining one of our athletic programs, please come! We would love to have you 🙂 And if you’re looking for a way to get involved as an adult, most of our programs are run by volunteers who are passionate about sports and enjoy working with kids. Please contact us if this is you and you would like to volunteer as well. We would love to hear from you!
-Community Chest
[1] Fraser-Thomas, J. L., Côté, J., & Deakin, J. (2005). Youth sport programs: An avenue to foster positive youth development. Physical Education & Sport Pedagogy, 10(1), 19–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/1740898042000334890
