Quincy, MA - More than a half-million kids across the country have had the opportunity to play sports because of donations from the Quincy-based nonprofit Good Sports.
“You want to make sure that if a kid wants to play baseball, the cost isn’t the barrier,” said Davin Lencz, the operations manager of Good Sports, which donates sports equipment to youth groups so underprivileged children can get in the game.
Melissa Harper, the group’s CEO and one of the founding board members, said enabling children to play is important because sports help kids in a number of ways, from doing better in school to not doing drugs to having higher self-esteem.
“Sports participation and physical activity is the only after-school activity that shows a high correlation to success, and when I say success, I mean success in everything,” Harper said.
Good Sports gets most of its sports equipment through partnerships with sporting goods companies. The companies give Good Sports their excess equipment, and Good Sports distributes it to youth sports groups.
According to Harper, Good Sports forms an average of 20 to 30 such partnerships a year.
Harper said there are a lot of considerations when determining which groups get donations.
“We sort of look at it like as investment,” she said. “Where can we put our basketballs where they’ll have the most impact on the kids that participate in the program?”
Good Sports was founded in 2003. Ten years later, it has donated $8.8 million worth of equipment to more than 1,000 sports groups across the country, helping give more than 650,000 children the chance to play.
Harper said the group estimates that there are 5.5 million children in the U.S. who can’t afford to play sports.
“Someday we’ll celebrate a million (kids helped), and hopefully someday we’ll celebrate five million,” she said.
To find out more about donating or volunteering with Good Sports, visit goodsports.org/
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