“It’s important for kids to be healthy,” he says from his cell phone. Fittingly, he has just finished watching his son’s soccer game. He talks as he strolls through the grass back to his vehicle.
Most kids who play sports don’t have time to get into trouble. Another thing is the camaraderie they get—when they’re playing sports, they learn to play on teams, they learn team values and they also learn new skills.”
To Andy, team sports aren’t about developing athletes as much as they are about developing people. He lists more benefits: leadership and the ability to win—and lose—gracefully. Determination. A positive outlook. It’s clear he could keep going.
Given his obvious belief in the value of recreation, it should come as no surprise that Andy is involved with an organization that helps to make sports accessible to all children. The Brick Sport Central has been collecting and repairing used sports equipment and giving them to kids in need since 1991. Andy, now the president, has been involved with the organization for 11 years.
Andy recently partnered with Calling Lake, an ACE community in northern Alberta. He drove up to Calling Lake for an ACE weekend youth conference where he spoke about leadership.
Andy first learned about The Brick Sport Central when he was working for The Brick chain of furniture stores. “I thought, ‘this is amazing,” he recalls. He gladly sat on Brick Sport Central’s board as a sponsor and, when he retired in 2000, jumped at the chance to sit on the board as an executive. “This is a really incredible program. I’ve got another year on my term and I'm looking forward to it.”
The goal? “To get as many kids playing sports as we can,” he says, “whether that sport is soccer, tennis, volleyball, hockey, baseball or basketball, we’ll help them. We even get people dropping off sleds and toboggans.”
The Brick Sport Central deals with about 200 agencies in Alberta that contact the volunteer-driven organization when there’s a child who wants to play a sport, but his or her family can’t afford the equipment. It partners with KidSport Canada, an organization that supplies the funding to cover the cost of registration.
Andy and the team of volunteers serve the needs of sports-minded kids in Alberta from Red Deer all the way north. They’ve even helped hockey groups in Inuvik and Northwest Territories. To get the necessary sizes for these faraway teams, the volunteers get innovative. “We send them a form that has foot tracings and measurements for leg length, arm length, chest width, all those things so we can outfit them,” he explains, adding that the day the equipment arrives is always a happy one for those communities. “It’s really cool. When that plane arrives up north, the kids come out to the plane, and each one of them gets a hockey bag, full of equipment, with their name on it. They’re really excited.”
Last year, The Brick Sport Central outfitted 8,000 kids. They gave away lacrosse, tennis, baseball and hockey equipment—“any sport a kid plays,” Andy says. The organization also distributed 1,500 bicycles, refurbishing them in the full-service bike shop, which is run by volunteer bike mechanics.
As with any volunteer-run organization, The Brick Sport Central relies on a wide network of people that are as committed to the cause as Andy is. Right now there are approximately 45 volunteers who work tirelessly to ensure no sports dream goes unfulfilled.
“We have kids who received equipment when they were younger who are now volunteering with us,” he says. “It’s really rewarding when you see that happen.”
For more information on the program, visit www.sportcentral.org/.
By Jen Janzen for ACE Communities
