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MICHAEL DUNNE: I’m Michael Dunne. It’s oddly poetic, but a fire started by a few kids that burned down the historic Civic Stadium in Eugene in 2015 would ultimately give rise to a sports facility where all kids can play. That, of course, is the Kidsports campus, and today, we check in with Bev Smith, Kidsports, Executive Director for those new to the area. Kidsports is the largest youth-oriented sports league in the region, and provides many, many opportunities for our youngest kids up to high school to play all sorts of team sports. Smith, a local legend and one of the greatest players in University of Oregon women’s basketball, has been at the helm of the organization for years and shares her thoughts on Kidsports, athletics and the sometimes-underappreciated importance of sports to our youth. Bev Smith, executive director of Kidsports, welcome. Welcome to the show.

BEV SMITH: Thank you. Michael, good to be back.

MICHAEL DUNNE: It’s always great to talk with you. You know. Let’s just start with this. How are things going at Kidsports, in terms of, you know, participation, any of the new facilities, just talk about how things are generally.

BEV SMITH: Well, Kidsports, for listeners that don’t know about the organization, which we you and I would probably go, you don’t know about kids, but if you’re new to Eugene, or just you know, visiting Kidsports is a 501©3 nonprofit that was originated in 1954 if you can believe it, as the Eugene Boys Athletic Association, and since then, has been a really staple of the community In terms of offering and developing and delivering youth sports for children ages about kindergarten through to 12th grade through to high school. And we serve currently around 12 – 13 thousand registrants a year in eight core sports. So, flag football, tackle football, soccer in the fall, volleyball in October, November, December, basketball, January through March. Then spring soccer, lacrosse and baseball, softball, T ball, which were just currently in our last week of our season. So, eight core sports throughout the academic year. Kidsports is Lane County’s number one multi-sport provider. We do not do any sport outside of that season in terms of league play, other than maybe some clinics and some opportunities for kids to work on their sport’s specific skills outside of our league play.

MICHAEL DUNNE: It’s been 10 years since where the Kidsports facility is now – the old Civic Stadium burned down, so it’s kind of this, you know, interesting, sort of phoenix rising from the ashes, because you have this beautiful new facility on that site. But with that burning down and, and with the advent of the Kidsports facility that, by the way, was launched during COVID, I mean, you’ve had challenge after challenge after challenge, but, but here you are.

BEV SMITH: Yes, I think it speaks to the resilience of our community and certainly the people that I have been working closely with to transform Civic Stadium to civic Park. It’s actually a storybook, you know, I hope there’s no ending to it continues to move on. But yes, it was 10 years ago, this June 29 that Civic Stadium, sadly and suddenly burned to the ground, and we lost a really important part of our culture, our history and our community. It was sad to see her go, but she went up in flames, and she kind of lit up the horizon, which she often did during the summer in hosting the M’s, who used to play baseball games there, and at one point, South Eugene High School played their league games there. There were weddings there, there were funerals there. It was really a community place and space to gather and Kidsports at that time. Had a building on Polk Street where we were next to the city fields, Graham city fields, and we had a building, a 40,000 square foot building, that had offices and an equipment room, and we didn’t have any kind of courts, we didn’t have any kind of fields. And so, we just really felt that it was time for us to be a true youth sport organization and have our own facility to run for things that we could do outside of our sports league. So yes, 10 years ago, we started the project of the transformation of Civic Stadium to civic Park in about 2014 with the nonprofit Eugene Civic Alliance. Art Johnson, a prominent personal injury lawyer, and his son, Derek, were really the two people that got us started on transform, transforming that and having that vision and reality of a of a field and a space and a place where our community could be active, and like most overnight successes, 10 years later, here we are with the completion of civic Park and the transformation still a little bit of fundraising to do to finish the capital campaign, but civic Park is alive and kicking right now and just really, really operating at high capacity and serving our community in ways that we weren’t once able to do.

MICHAEL DUNNE: I want to talk about the importance of youth sports. I mean, your organization fulfills such a critical role. Because, in all honesty, a lot of schools have had to drop sports and those sorts of things, or PE and whatnot. And so, you know, you really fulfill this, this important niche in the community. I have done shows on the epidemic of childhood obesity. I’ve done shows about the correlation between sedentary lifestyle and depression, I mean, just talk about what sports can mean for kids, both as exercise and health, but also in a whole host of other ways.

BEV SMITH: Well, you really, you know, hit the point. Michael, I think that with physical activity, we are still cave people. We are still physically, you know, having to move our bodies, you know, though, through the universe. And some of us can do that really well. Some of us have challenges. Some of us have physical and mental and neurological challenges. And one of the things that Kidsports with its own building is we’ve been able to expand our services to people that do have those kinds of challenges of moving their body. But really, when you think of it as being cave people, we are fight, flight or freeze, and so having your body dialed into movement actually is an opportunity for you to experience what we call our hormones. You know, our happy hormones, dopamine, serotonin, the endorphins that you have happened to you when you are physically active, even just walking, they cascade on your brain and help you manage your day in a different way, without that and so for developing children, you can only imagine it. Research shows that even 20 minutes of moderate to visit, moderate to intense physical activity a day helps a child not only physically develop, but also cognitively develop and emotionally and socially develop, and these are critical factors in our sedentary lifestyle of today. And so, what youth sport does is it not it’s not just about winning and losing games. In fact, at Kidsports, we say sometimes you win, sometimes you learn, and the rest of the time you should be having fun after school. Youth Sport opportunities are actually elongating the day of learning. You learn so many things on the fields and facilities of play that you can’t necessarily learn in the classroom. You learn self-regulation. I was a very intense Little League person, and so, you know, playing the best and wanting to win the game was important. But I had to learn that sometimes I wasn’t successful in the outcome, and I had to manage that, or I was successful in the outcome, and I had to manage that. And our volunteer coaches, over 1,100 volunteer coaches in this community, which is every time I think of it, every time I walk into a room where there’s 100 volunteer coaches for a meeting, I am just emotionally charged at the consideration that they have to help our kids with those learning opportunities after school and during their games. It really is, and right now, a lot of people think we need to take physical activity out of our schools to focus on academic academics, well, research actually shows, if your child is physically active for 20 to 60 minutes a day, they are at an academic advantage. They are able to cognitively learn in a sit in a situation that is better for their ability to take in instruction, to be curious and to move the needle on their understanding of all their classroom subjects. And so, I really believe that the achievement gap is truly affected by the activity gap. The more activity we have, the more we achieve, the less activity that we have, the less opportunity we have to achieve. We can still achieve it. But I think it comes at a cost to kids that right now need, need activity more than ever.

MICHAEL DUNNE: Yeah, you know too, as you were talking about the history of Kidsports and how it started out as a boys League, if you will. And certainly, that has changed over the decades, and you’ve witnessed this. You know, for many people who are listening to us, they know who you are and that you’re a legend at the U of O and as a basketball player. And certainly, you know you’ve, you’ve lived this the Title IX explosion, and, and women’s sports. But talk about that, because obviously, you know it wasn’t when you were a little girl. Probably the same opportunities didn’t exist. Talk about how that advent of women’s sports has been so important in this journey.

BEV SMITH: Well, you’re right, Michael When I was young, growing up in Canada, my first love was hockey. My dad was a hockey player. My mom skated and taught, you know, Tiny Tot skating, and we lived on the ice, you know, it just was part of our culture, and I really wanted to play hockey, and we played on the ponds, and at one point, the boys went to minor hockey, and I wasn’t allowed to go, because I was a girl, and that was devastating to me. My mother said I had to find something more lady liked to play, and so found the game of basketball, which I have no regrets about, but you know, we didn’t have those opportunities. And generations before me, like my mother certainly did, didn’t have any opportunity to play on a basketball team, and if she did play on a basketball team, she was relegated to either the half court playing defense or the front court playing offense, because, you know, young women certainly weren’t able to physically manage that stress. But we’ve, we’ve discovered through the years, and I think even at Kidsports, you know, our fathers, founding fathers and mothers said, hey, if this is good for our boys, it has to be good for our girls. And so, as a result, in 1972 with the advent of Title Nine and that legislation that required all federally funded facilities to provide equal access to after school learning opportunities such as sports. You know, girls started to become in to Kidsports, which is why the organized changed its name from the Eugene boys Athletic Association to the Eugene sports program, which then morphed into Kidsports when we went and served out of district communities that given a chance and given the opportunity, young girls are very capable of both participating, playing and being successful in their pursuit of athletic excellence.

MICHAEL DUNNE: I want to take an opportunity to sort of talk with you a little bit about it must be gratifying to see now that not only is it that girls are able to participate in sports, although I think that’s the most important thing. But we’re also seeing fairly suddenly, women’s professional sports aren’t just a, oh, that’s nice that they’re able to play there. It’s becoming a massive, massive uh, industry, if you will. And, and certainly, you’ve talked about our own Sabrina Ionescu, how her success at the New York Liberty, certainly, you know, with Caitlin Collins, and what’s happening with her. I realize you were good enough to play in a professional league, and you did play professionally overseas. If you took a 22-year-old Bev Smith you’d go to the WNBA. But it must be gratifying to see that that’s becoming not just a fringe sport, that’s becoming a very, very popular sport.

BEV SMITH: Yes, it is. It’s becoming something that people you know go out of their way to see when Caitlin Clark is playing again, right? When is Sabrina playing what’s happening? I’ve really kind of taken my hat off to the WNBA and those sorts of generational players that came into the league in 1996 and have slowly created a collective bargaining agreement with the WNBA in this last iteration of their leadership. Nneka Ogwumike, who plays for Seattle, was a Stanford grad, unfortunately, coached against her. Was happy to see her graduate. She is the player’s representative. And really, in the last eight years, what the WNBA has said, look at we understand. We only have a 35 to 40 game schedule. We’re not playing 82 games like the men. We play in a very short season from about May until September, and so we cannot, right now, require that those salaries match those of the men. There’s just not the TV deal, there’s not the income. But what we can do is we can look after our players to make sure that our product on the court is the best that it can be. So what? How do we do that? Well, sometimes these players have three games in a week, and they’re going from New York to Connecticut to Los Angeles. Three years ago, we were traveling by commercial airline. We’ve all traveled commercial airlines recently, and there are delays, there are cancellations, there are seats that you don’t fit into as a six-foot seven professional basketball player, and so through their collective bargaining, rather than just on that sticking point of salaries, we need charter flights. There’s just no way we can get around keeping our players healthy and safe without charter flights. We need to make sure that we are resting properly, that we have the peripheral stuff that helps our players recover and get ready to play a game. There were times three years ago when a team would be getting flying commercially to a game, the flight would be canceled at night, they would have to sleep in the airport, I’m not exaggerating, and get on a flight the next morning fly and were expected to play that just had to be a part of the collective bargaining and so I really admire those players for understanding what they could control in that moment. And as a result of that, you have a lot more players wanting to stay home and play in the W rather than leave early or come late to play overseas, where they can probably make anywhere from 100,000 to $800,000 more a year. So, I think what they’ve done is they’ve made arrangements to make which is smart and intelligent and the way women think. Not those men don’t think correctly either, but they’re looking after each other, sure their product becomes something that is entertaining and that people make arrangements around their lives to go and see.

MICHAEL DUNNE: It must also be gratifying as a fan, but also somebody, an insider who’s very knowledgeable, to see that both little girls and little boys are buying Caitlin Clark and Sabrina Ionescu and Angel Reese jerseys and that idea of role models and aspiring to something like that is no longer confined to, you know, the Lebron James’s and the Michael Jordan’s of the world.

BEV SMITH: It really has become, you know, kind of fan worship spanning the entire milieu. Men and women. Well, kids recognize game. Yeah, kids know what, who’s a good player. And you know, when you see Caitlin Clark shooting from the logo and consistently making it, also has a game that she’s got good handles, she’s got great ability to pass the ball in play, making and there’s many of other players you know that we can watch in the league that can do that, but you’re right, it’s become normalized. And so, to your point, part of what Kidsports really tries to do is we also try to incorporate and intentionally recruit women coaches. And right now, the average in the United States of America for youth coaches with female coaches in youth sports leagues is 24% right now, Kidsports has around 42% which is very high. And it’s intentional, because we really believe mothers can coach. They often feel that they can’t. And we’re like, look at if you come and coach, you get to control the schedule when you practice and at times when you play. And you’re doing that anyway by signing up. And so we’ve, we’ve been able to get a lot of females being coaches, and now kids are growing up that that’s normal. I I have, you know, Bev is my coach, or Beth is my coach, or Shelley’s my coach, and they don’t even blink. Whereas, back in the day, you know, I had a good friend of mine, she had a dog, and she was walking in the park, and a person said, Hey, What’s your dog’s name? And she said, My dog’s name is coach. And the person said, Well, your dog is a male, or dog is a female, yeah? And she’s like, Yeah, you know. So just those kinds of cultural things kind of now filter out. And if you were to go and ask someone who had a female dog and her name was coach, you’d be fine with that. So, it has taken time, but I think people have continued to push and push and push and advocate for, you know, just let’s get equity out there for both and for everyone in that sense. And I think that Kidsports has been a big part of that in this community, and now we have young girls and boys certainly believing that they could be a coach, that they could be a player, that they could be the next Sabrina. And certainly, you never know what’s going to turn the light bulb on for many children with those kinds of examples in front of them.

MICHAEL DUNNE: Bev, my last question for you is kind of, we talked about the 10-year anniversary of Civic burning down in the beginnings of your new facility. What do you think the next 10 years is going to be for Kidsports?

BEV SMITH: Really good question. We’re, you know, we’re just now seeing what the facility can offer not just our children, but our family. So, we’ve got pickleball happening in our facility. We have volleyball, adult volleyball, adult basketball. We have adult kickball. We have all kinds of children’s camps and after school. PE classes. We’re teaching them dance. We’re teaching them Hip Hop self-defense classes. We have a really robust, what we call our Fit kids youth sports program that allows kids to come in and sport samples without having to sign up for a whole year. And the league, we have basketball clinics, we have volleyball clinics, we have soccer clinics, and so the next 10 years, I think, is going to be still our core mission of helping all.

Kids play, and that is by providing you sport experiences with teams, and then secondly, building those other sport programs. This year we had unified kickball and unified basketball, so bringing able-bodied people to play with our physically challenged, you know, community so that they can play a game and have an opportunity to have an official and play a solid game and keep score. That has been just so wonderful to see. And we’re expanding those programs so that any kid that has a chance and wants to move their body and be a part of something bigger than themselves has that opportunity. So, we’re really, you know, coming out of COVID has, you know, kind of slowed everything down for us, which, in a sense, has been good because we’ve been able to take our time and really feel what is important in the community, to help and to elevate. And as a result, I think the next 10 years are going to be as productive and as wonderful as you know, the last 10 have been since the fire.

MICHAEL DUNNE: Bev Smith, executive director of Kidsports, it’s always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming in.

BEV SMITH: Thank you for having me.

MICHAEL DUNNE: That’s the show today. All episodes of Oregon on the record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Recently, we asked you to share your thoughts on the recent rallies and protests occurring in the community, we received hundreds of comments on social media, and here are just a few. One person wrote – protesters, going to protest. Let’s see how loud we can whine. Another said – never seen so many people downtown at the same time honking. Thank you, police for keeping us safe. One took issue with the overall vibe by saying – just your average weekend for the weirdos in Eugene bet the store sold out of purple and green hair dye for their preparation. Yet another pointed out that the impact of protests is not always immediate by saying – even an action that shows it’s not productive can accomplish something. Keep sending in your comments to our Facebook blue sky or Instagram pages, and you can always go to questions@klcc.org. Monday on the show, you’ll hear from a young Bend woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury during a skiing accident, but has persevered to graduate from OSU Cascades. I’m Michael Dunne, and this has been Oregon On The Record from KLCC, thanks for listening.