This article was underwritten in part by the Mickey Flacks Journalism Fund for Social Justice, a proud, innovative supporter of local news. To make a contribution go to sbcan.org/journalism_fund.

Maybe he taught you to play basketball or maybe you listened to his KCSB radio show, Ital Soundz, on Sundays. Bernard Hicks was a dedicated mentor and coach, a smooth-talking deejay and radio host dialed into the worlds of reggae and African music, and a loving husband and father to his family. For half a century, Hicks brought good into the Santa Barbara community. He died on Friday, May 16, at the age of 73. 

“He was a man of service not only for his family but for the community as well,” his youngest son, Jelani Hicks, told the Independent.  

Born and raised in New York City, Hicks came west for school and sport. He attended Hartnell Junior College in Salinas, where he played basketball. There, Hicks met his wife, Lilly. In the ’70s, the couple moved to Santa Barbara and Hicks attended UCSB, where he started volunteering for the radio station, KCSB. 

The Hickses grew in Santa Barbara. His son Jelani said that through his life, he showed a deep love for his family. Hicks first got involved in coaching youth basketball when he brought his children to the Goleta Boys & Girls Club to teach them to play. Jelani says he coached all five of his children over the years. 

At the Goleta Boys & Girls Club, Hicks met Sal Roderiguez, the unit director at the time and later the CEO. Roderiguez says he saw Hicks’s skills instructing on the court and convinced him to coach basketball. From there, Hicks spent roughly the next 50 years coaching kids. 

“It was one of the best hires I’ve ever made in my life,” Roderiguez said. 

Hicks was a frequent volunteer at the Goleta Boys & Girls Club before he was hired as the athletics director at Santa Barbara’s Westside Boys & Girls Club. Later, Hicks would coach at the Eastside Boys & Girls Club (which rebranded as The Club in 2024). He was coaching the Santa Barbara Legends, a team of 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th graders, the week he passed. 

Roderigeuz, who played basketball and coached alongside Hicks, said he was a fair coach who did his work because he cared.  

“He’d go out of his way to help kids,” Roderiguez said, adding that Hicks stepped into a mentor and parental role with athletes who needed support, especially kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. 

Jelani Hicks said that his father and mother both provided a welcoming home and support system for kids without stable family lives. 

In addition to his roles at the Boys & Girls Clubs, Hicks coached at Dos Pueblos and San Marcos High School, as well as for the Dreamchasers — a girls’ basketball program started by Jelani Hicks. 

“He means so much to this community in so many different ways,” said Mark Alvarado, longtime friend and executive director of The Club.

Alvarado said he befriended Hicks at KCSB radio in 1989. He said when he got the job at the Eastside Boys & Girls Club, Hicks was the first person he called. 

Hicks, he said, had a peace and integrity about him. 

“When you come from a different community and you come into S.B., you bring in different knowledge of the world, and Bernard shared it humbly,” Alvarado said.

Along with his coaching legacy, Hicks made a name for himself in the world of radio. He started volunteering at KCSB in the 1970s. For decades, he hosted Ital Soundz, a mix of reggae and African styles, using the on-air name Bernard Hitz. 

Winston, also known by his on-air name Cool Ruler on radio station KJEE, said Hick’s years in the reggae world has given him a long legacy. 

“He [belongs on] the Rushmore of deejaying reggae music — a high mountain to climb,” he said. 

Winston met Hicks at KCSB in 1977, but had listened to his radio show as a young man. They became friends after attending a concert together in Long Beach and remained close friends until Hicks’s death. Winston said that along with his deejay skills, Hicks was a loving person who was always smiling. 

Hicks also helped with KCSB’s fund drives and did workshops on how to deejay and be live on air. KCSB advisor and host Ted Coe said he was an approachable, captivating storyteller and listener — and he excelled at speaking live. 

“He was so good at it. He had an amazing radio voice,” he said. 

Hicks even got a shout-out from the famous ska and reggae musician Jimmy Cliff after local artists who grew up listening to Hicks’s show had a chance to tour with Cliff. 

Coe said his dedication to the radio was incredible, with Hicks volunteering his time every week for more than four decades. 

Hicks gave himself to his community. Jelani Hicks said he was also a family man who took pride in his children and grandchildren. 

Along with his wife, Lilly, Hicks leaves behind five children, Maurice Hicks, Aisha Hicks Smiley, Khary Hicks, Noni Hicks, and Jelani Hicks; six grandchildren, Isaiah Hicks, Isaac Hicks Smiley, Julian Hicks, Malila Hicks Smiley, Amelia Hicks Smiley, and Ephraim Hicks Smiley; and one great-grandson, Josiah Hicks. 

Hicks’s family is currently planning a celebration of life open to the community to celebrate him.

The Irvine Pony 9-and-under team Mustang Division team coached by Andy Dennis, Ty Kincade and Vic Liu. (PHOTOS: Tim Burt, OC Sports Zone).

Stands were packed Thursday evening as hundreds of youth baseball players took part in opening ceremonies for the 33rd annual Irvine Pony Memorial Day Tournament at Harvard Park.

Games begin Friday and continue through Monday at fields in Irvine, Tustin and Costa Mesa.

The tournament field grew so much that organizers looked for fields in other cities. This year, there are a record 344 teams, including 20 from Mexico, according to Tournament Director Stacie Sloniger. There were 286 teams last year.

To see the slide show, click on the first photo:

Hundreds of teams lined up for opening ceremonies at Harvard Park.

One of the Tustin teams gets ready to head onto the field.

Young players get ready for the parade of teams.

Irvine Pony President and MC JD Hardin welcomes players during the parade of teams.

Players head to the field during the parade of teams.

One of the teams from Mexico poses for a picture.

Players get ready for the introductions.

Players and coaches from one of the Santa Ana teams.

Some of the players from the Irvine Pony 13-and-under team coached by Dave Castle.

There will be 728 games over the three days, including the Great Park.

” …. We got so big this year, so we had to go outside of Irvine to accommodate,” Sloniger said. “We’re looking at hopefully securing all of the fields at the Great Park next year so we can bring it on back into Irvine.

“We’re grateful and thankful that Costa Mesa and the City of Tustin allowed us use of the fields. We also have Irvine High School, Portola High School, Springbrook Elementary School that we also got from Irvine Unified School District.”

Fans attended the opening ceremony cheering for their teams.

“We’re really excited to have Arizona this year,” Sloniger said. “Last year we had a Utah team, but this is the first year that Arizona has been in the tournament.”

Irvine Mayor Larry Agran welcomed fans and players to the tournament and presented Hardin and Sloniger certificates for their years volunteering with the league.

All the teams from Mexico were also welcomed by league officials.

All the parking lots at Harvard Park were full and those attending parked their cars in a surrounding neighborhoods. Concession stand sales appeared to be brisk.

Schedule information is available by going to the Irvine Pony website.

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After years of fundraising, the Southern Youth Sports Association finally got the green light from the city of Pensacola to move forward with the construction of the Rafferty Center at Legion Field.

Welcome to May-cember, my friends, the month in which parents relinquish all earthly responsibilities to spend more hours than a five-star Uber driver in their car or else idle in grim middle school gyms, holding iPhones in the air like lighters at a Phish concert, scouring for reliable Wi-Fi.

“I have a hard time understanding how sports trump sleep and health. Full stop,” says Arlington’s Dana Lynne Varga, a mom of two neurodivergent elementary schoolers. Both play spring sports. The games start late and run long, upending dinner and crucial downtime.

“I expressed my frustration with the late start times for games for kids so young and was met with lots of camaraderie and a lot of ‘get over it.’ … The late games are a huge lift,” she says.

Her kids’ routines are disrupted; everyone is grouchy. She understands that many coaches are volunteers who can’t arrive until evening — they double as working parents! — but this means that games seem to finish when bars close. She‘s reconsidering her kids’ participation in certain sports because it’s untenable.

What’s going on here? Do kids with extracurriculars belong to a leisure class of parents with ultra-flexible jobs — or no jobs at all — with infinite time to chauffeur, cheer, and coach? Don’t the Sports Gods know that people work?

“In my town, it feels like [sports are] social hour for parents who have too much free time: It’s a battle of judgment on both sides, which is so unfair and ultimately makes kids feel like they aren’t as supported as other kids. I think youth sports organizations need to better support families,” says one Freetown parent.

Organized sports are increasingly becoming the realm of the well-off, with parents who can afford to pay hefty club fees and maintain autonomous schedules.

A recent study of US sports participation over the last 60 years from Ohio State University found a significant increase in kids playing organized sports, particularly among more privileged, educated families.

The study found that about 70 percent of Americans born in the ’90s, reaching age 18 by 2015-16, said they took part in organized sports through recreational, school, or club teams, while slightly more than half of those born in the ’50s reported participating in organized youth sports.

However: For kids born in the ’50s, there were few class differences in who played organized sports. For kids born in the ’90s, the share of those who played organized sports were 24 percentage points higher when they had a college-educated parent. The average family paid $883 annually for one child‘s primary sport in 2022, according to Project Play by the Aspen Institute.

“For most of us who are single parents, poverty, a lack of time, an always messy home, a lack of support in emergencies, and loneliness is enough of a burden. We don’t need the responsibility of providing more play and activity as well to keep our kids at a baseline level of health. The ironic thing is that most schools have plenty of playground space and wouldn’t have to do much to provide the physical activity kids need to be healthy. I truly hope someone takes this seriously at some point,” says Cambridge’s Pam Cash.

One interesting factoid: This disparity is particularly noticeable for kids ages 6-12, where sports participation in homes earning $100,000 or more increased 6 percent from 2023 to 2024 — but actually declined 2 percent for the wealthiest youth ages 13-17.

Why? Too much pressure, maybe. Instead of choosing one sport, some kids are loading up on two or three. Or else they’re specializing in one sport so narrowly, competing on so many teams with so many conflicting schedules, that they’re run ragged before they’re old enough to drive to a 9 p.m. practice themselves.

“These kids are often being fed sports with a fire hose,” said Tom Farrey, Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program executive director. “There is lots of pressure on them to play one sport year-round, traveling all over the place. Some are burning out or are just too injured to continue playing.”

Their parents are burned out, too, and this is true even for activities that kids enjoy. Westwood‘s Patrick French found time to weigh in on the extracurricular conundrum mid-afternoon, while driving his son to an a cappella lesson. Both he and his wife have full-time jobs with on-site components; she serves on their town’s school committee, and he performs in community plays. Their teens participate in soccer (school and club), theater, and voice. Occasionally, the couple finds time to watch a TV show; they’re midway through four different series and will finish one, hopefully “The Wire,” when they find time.

I ask French how we got here. I tell him that I remember my own childhood — when the highlight of my week was riding a pink Huffy to New London Style Pizza with my best friend, Vicky, and when extracurricular activities were held right after school, at the school. Seems quaint now.

“We’re often signing our kids up for all these structured activities in the hopes that, by doing all these things, they’re going to continue to really develop as human beings,” he says. “I think it’s probably peer pressure. If you’re not participating in as many things, then maybe, in some ways, you’re worried about your kid being left out.”

FOMO is real. Parents who weighed in for this piece underscored that the meteoric rise of club sports — with weekends-long travel tournaments in towns you’ve never heard of, often populated by college recruiters — are a presumed necessity for kids who long to compete at a higher level. Which, fine: But for every budding Jayson Tatum, there are thousands of anonymous athletes riding the bench and devouring 12 straight nights of Chipotle while their parents do off-camera Zoom calls from a hot spot in the parking lot.

Then there’s the mental load: the logistics, the carpool strategizing, the remembering which bag goes with whose cleats and which car goes to which field. New research from the University of Bath and the University of Melbourne, published in the Journal of Marriage & Family, reminds us that mothers overwhelmingly carry this mental load.

The study found that American moms take on seven in 10 of all household mental load tasks, ranging from planning meals and arranging activities to managing household finances. This comes as no surprise to any mother who has six different league-scheduling apps on her phone, a carpool text thread with 12 unknown numbers, and a rickety foldable chair with a cup holder rattling in her trunk, ready for action.

Emily Sheff, an assistant professor of nursing at Rivier University, has a PhD in burnout among nursing faculty. Expertise aside, the Bedford, N.H., mom is a work in progress as she navigates extracurriculars for her teenagers; in fact, she transitioned to a work-from-home teaching position to keep up with their schedules.

To maintain some shred of balance, Sheff wakes up at 5:10 a.m. for a morning boot camp to meet friends.

“That’s where we stress about our days ahead. I need to have fellow moms and friends in the trenches with me, and it helps to debrief and de-stress,” she says.

Meanwhile, pulling her kids from activities — even inconveniently timed ones — doesn’t feel like an option, either. Success favors the flexible.

“Then they miss out on an opportunity, which leads into the tryouts in two months, and that means they don’t make the team,” she says. “What I’ve been doing for the past 17 years is just taking on the burden, and then once every six to eight months, I have a huge cry session. I break, and then I pick up the pieces, and I start all over.”

Once a month, she joins friends for margarita lunches to vent about the inequity of it all, even though she has a helpful partner who pitches in. The household systems are so entrenched that it doesn’t much matter.

“My husband always says: ‘What can I do? How can I help? Let me know what to do.’ But again, it goes back to the mental load: If I have to know what to do in my head and then communicate to you what to do and then check after it’s done, that doesn’t even help,” she says.

Hingham’s Cam Smith, who has a fairly autonomous work schedule — and three kids in a total of 20 activities, many of which meet multiple times per week — sees the double-standard firsthand. Although he‘s the point person for most activities, many messages are still reflexively channeled to his wife, whose job is less flexible.

“I do think there’s a deeply unfair mental load which still gets put on mothers every time in this. The sports tend to be a little better, but all these activities take [my wife’s] contact info because they just assume she needs to be the primary contact. Our daughters have been competing in Irish step dance for more than six years, and we have tried numerous times to get their Irish dance school to add my contact to all their correspondence. They just don’t do it,” he says.

Brookline’s Julie Starr, a single mom who works full time as a nutritionist, relies on carpools and ride-sharing for her high-school athlete, who runs track and plays soccer. She outsources where she can because she has to: At a certain level, deprioritizing practices or games just isn’t an option.

Her work vacations don’t match up with her daughter’s vacations, but sports schedules don’t match working realities, either. So she improvises.

“If you go on vacation, you’re not going to play. During her school vacation, practices are during the day, so she takes an Uber sometimes,” Starr says. “The vacation weeks are horrible.”

Sometimes Starr takes client calls from the parking lots of games; other times, she skips games entirely (and hopes other parents let themselves off the hook, too). But she insists on serving a nutritious dinner no matter what — “we’re humans, not raccoons,” she says — but that requires conscientious meal prep on Sundays: sweet potatoes, pre-chopped salads, and roast chicken play starring roles. Even when she’s not working, she’s working.

Starr has advice for parents just now wading into the madness, wondering if their kids are benefiting from this whirlwind.

“Notice: ‘Are they happy? Do they really enjoy doing this?’ And don’t get too crazy before they’re in seventh grade, especially with the club and the travel teams — and find somebody to carpool with,” Starr says.

Needn’t be a friend, just a sentient being with access to a driver’s license.

Another key tip: Keep perspective.

“Having so many sports all at once is too much on their bodies as well. It’s about keeping in mind that, when they’re 25 years old, the bulk majority of these kids aren’t going to be professional sports players,” says Lakeville’s Krista Allan, a single mom who was widowed several years ago.

Time is precious. And so, when deciding how to occupy her kids, she thinks: “This is really about learning teamwork, learning how to take guidance from other people, and thinking through the real purpose of sports and activities for kids. I think it’s important to level-set.”

Wise words, but hard to remember when you’re driving from Raynham to Rowley in the hopes of seeing your child compete for 10 seconds in the high-visibility lacrosse tournament while eating a Chipotle burrito with your one free hand.

“I personally always feel like I’m running from one thing to the next and hardly ever taking time to just stop and — I don’t know — look at a flower blooming for a second,” says French, the Westwood dad.

That is, unless he‘s stopped in traffic on the way to a game at rush hour.

Kara Baskin can be reached at kara.baskin@globe.com. Follow her @kcbaskin.

JACKSONVILLE – The Youth Shooting Sports state finals in both senior and junior divisions May 30-31 should be full of excitement with championships up in the air — that is, if the regional competition at the Arkansas Game and Fish Foundation Shooting Sports Complex over the past four weeks is any indication.

The Brookland Bearcats Misfires team did anything but that in winning the East Region in the YSS senior division. Brookland’s 240 clays hit out of 250 attempts was the best among all shooters during the four weeks of regional competition, and it also was enough to edge out perennial YSS powerhouse Corning in the East by four clays, with defending senior state champion Westside Red finishing third at 228 on the first weekend.

Texarkana Arkansas Razorback Senior Red won last weekend’s South Region with a 239 total, the second-best score among all senior teams in the regionals. That was easily enough to get past Ashdown Squad 1, which hit 231 clays, and Mountain Valley Sportsman’s Association, which took third with 229 targets hit and survived a scramble among five teams separated by two targets. MVSA carded off Spring Hill for third.

Bald Knob Red, with a winning 236 targets hit in the North Region, and Shiloh Christian School Black Lions, with their 229 targets being just enough to slide by Berryville in the West Region by one target, sewed up top seeds for the senior state tourney, set for May 31.

Ozark Youth Team 1 out of Northwest Arkansas was third in the West. Highland was runner-up to Bald Knob in the North, and the Cave City Cavemen 1 won a card-off for third place in the North, topping the Rose Bud Sharp Shooters Top Guns, as both hit 229 targets.

Jonesboro Trap Team Red in the East may go into the junior state tourney a heavy favorite as its 121 score out of 125 attempts dusted the rest of the junior competition — though, to be fair, each weekend had its own varied weather and wind that potentially affected scores. Westside, the runner-up in the East, had the second-best overall score of any junior team at 116. Five Rivers Trap Club’s Current River squad was third, nine behind the winners but just ahead of a pair of Cabot teams.

Nashville Orange cruised in the West junior region with a 115 score. Bald Knob Red was best in the North among juniors, like its senior team, in hitting 105 targets. Shiloh Christian also collected a junior regional title by taking the West with a best 104 targets hit.

Spring Hill, in second, and Ashdown, in third, collected trophies in the West junior tourney, and Nashville Black almost squeezed into the trophy presentation, finishing fourth. Bergman 1 and Highland Red were right on Bald Knob’s heels in the North, though, finishing second and third, respectively. Berryville and Alma Team 1 were second and third to Shiloh in the West, both five targets behind but Berryville winning the card-off for second.