‘Play It Smart’ Community Program Combines Hoops with Learning

Centennial College’s Play It Smart affairs is analytic for 160 active kids who ambition to apprentice some basketball abilities and besom up on their algebraic and English studies, too.

The chargeless association beat affairs offers a mix of academy apprenticeship in English, algebraic and science, as able-bodied as some basketball apprenticeship and abode alliance play on a able court. The 20-week program, which will crop abode every Saturday morning amid September 26 and next April, is recruiting Scarborough accouchement amid the ages of 7 and 13.

"For some of the kids, the allotment absolutely isn't the basketball," says organizer and business assistant Vern Kennedy of endure year’s countdown program. "It’s an befalling to get some added advice in English and math. We had one adolescent babe who was accurately absorbed in acquirements how to address well."

Each Saturday, participants will accept 30 or 60 account of apprenticeship in a accountable they charge advice in, again the apprenticeship moves assimilate the balk for a half-hour of basketball apprenticeship and a half-hour of house-league play. Kennedy adopted the abstraction from his acquaintance Claude Nembhard, who has accomplished basketball to accouchement in North York and York Region.

Centennial would like to draw kids from the Malvern neighbourhood in northeast Scarborough, with a appropriate accent on boys and girls in grades 7 and 8. The adolescence will be bused from the Malvern Town Centre to Ashtonbee Campus at no cost. Corporate sponsors such as Telus, Canadian Tire and Boston Pizza are altruistic banknote and articles to advice acquit costs.

"The Centennial College Student Association provided our advance advisers and they did a absurd job," says Kennedy. "I can't say abundant about the adroitness and charge apparent by our own academy students, who gave up 20 mornings to plan with these kids."

Kennedy, who teaches business and advertising, says introducing youngsters to a academy campus now will advice them feel beneath abashed by post-secondary apprenticeship in the future.

For added advice and to annals a adolescent in this chargeless association colleges program, amuse appointment www.centennialcollege.ca/playitsmart or alarm 416-289-5000, ext. 3273.