Want to learn about the variety of exciting sports available to Cambridge girls in Kindergarten – 5th grade? Join us at Cambridge Girls in Sports Night on Tuesday, January 20 at the War Memorial Field House (1640 Cambridge St., Door 15) from 5 –7 p.m.!

Research shows that girls who play sports are more likely to get better grades; have higher levels of confidence and self-esteem; develop critical skills necessary for success in the workplace; and build a larger community of friends.

At Cambridge Girls in Sports Night, attendees can:

• Explore new sports and discover local Cambridge teams 
• Meet representatives from hockey, ultimate frisbee, lacrosse, soccer, flag football, cheerleading, softball, and more!
• Participate in hands-on demonstrations
• Sign up on the spot for athletic leagues
• Enjoy games, pizza, and more!  

The event, presented by the Cambridge Women’s Commission and Cambridge Recreation, is open to anyone in grades K – 5 who identifies as a girl or with girlhood.

Registration is required to attend. Register Here!

After the event, stay to cheer on the CRLS Girls Varsity Basketball Team at 7 p.m.! (Attending the game is free!)

Questions? Contact Adam Corbeil, Director of Cambridge Recreation, at acorbeil@cambridgema.gov. 

View Event Flyer (PDF)

In the summer of 2024, you couldn’t pin Khloe Ison down. But her parents, Akilah Crowner and Keemie Ison, did the best they could to keep up. 

While Baltimore basketball prodigy Ison was traveling with Team Durant — NBA star Kevin Durant’s Nike-sponsored Elite Youth Basketball League team — her parents were paying and coordinating their own way to get to her games and tournaments.

First were the round-trip rental car trips to Albany, New York, for a warmup tournament and Hampton, Virginia, for the first EYBL event, arriving on Thursdays and back home on Sundays. Then it was a round-trip flight to Iowa for the next EYBL long weekend, followed by a quick run down the road for another three-day tournament in Philly. 

Next up was Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for a Team USA event. The third stop on the Nike tour was Lexington, Kentucky. With the EYBL finals in Chicago that very next week, they chose to stay in Lexington a few extra days before flying to the Windy City on a Thursday and heading back to Baltimore on Sunday at the end of July.

The next weekend was the Blue Star Camp in Indianapolis, an invite-only affair for the country’s best seventh and eighth graders. 

It was an exhausting — and expensive — schedule. 

The average American household, according to a recent Aspen Institute study, spends $1,016 per year on their child’s primary sport. But that number pales in comparison to what’s spent on the most elite kids who have realistic dreams of college and pro stardom.

Over the past two years alone, Ison’s parents conservatively estimate they’ve spent over $20,000 on their daughter’s basketball pursuits, factoring in line items such as gas and car repairs from running up and down the road for practices and games, healthier grocery shopping lists, rental car fees, airline tickets, individual training sessions, massages, cryotherapy, and dining out on the road, among other expenses. 

Because of her stature as a top national prospect, all of Ison’s airfare, lodging, equipment, shoes, apparel, meal stipends, and tournament entry fees are bankrolled by Team Durant’s Nike sponsorship.

But even with Nike’s largesse, which also covers Crowner and Keemie’s hotel fees when the team plays out of town, they’re on their own for airfare, ground transportation, meals, and other ancillary expenses to occupy their other kids while on the road. 

Those numbers add up quickly.

Factoring in everything over the last six years starting from that very first travel tournament, way before that Nike EYBL money kicked in, they’re looking at a tab that easily runs into six figures.

“Vacations?” said Crowner, a technology systems engineer. “We’ll do something while we’re on the road to make it feel like a vacation.”

And for the tens of thousands of other kids that are not in that elite Nike EYBL stratosphere, playing on a plethora of less heralded youth teams and circuits all over the country hoping against the greatest of odds to be noticed by a college coach, all of those fees come out of their parents’ own pockets.

“We’ve sacrificed and put everything to the side,” said Keemie, who teaches physical education at Collington Square Elementary. “Her mom goes to all of the tournaments. And if she can’t go, I go.”

But it’s worth it. For Ison, the St. Frances Academy freshman phenom, it’s the path to greatness. In the prep basketball world, the preternaturally gifted point guard is among the country’s top ranked players in the Class of 2029.

When she was finally back home after the summer season, it was time to rest. But Ison was still working out with trainers and refining her skills. About to enter eighth grade, she was already facing a dizzying array of high school tours and recruitment visits throughout Maryland, DC, and Northern Virginia.

And the recruiting wasn’t simply limited to the prep level. That summer, a full year before graduating from middle school, she received full scholarship offers from the University of Wisconsin, University of Maryland, and George Mason. Georgetown, Providence, and other colleges have since been added to that list, which will likely grow exponentially over the next few years.

As her family weighed their options on where she’d attend high school, their trip to IMG Academy, the private Florida boarding school where Maria Sharapova, Carlos Alcaraz, and Serena and Venus Williams honed their adolescent tennis skills, was especially memorable. 

The scenery was tempting, with a lushly manicured 600-acre campus, practice facilities that put some NBA franchises to shame, and a promise that Ison would start on the varsity squad as an eighth grader. But her parents couldn’t quite fathom heading back to Maryland without their 13-year-old daughter.

“The visit was amazing, but she was just too young for us to consider leaving her there to attend IMG in the eighth grade,” said Crowner. “Then the tropical storm hit. Every flight out from Sunday to Tuesday was cancelled. We had to pay to stay three extra days. I couldn’t take another night sitting in that hotel room, we had to get out of there.”

So Crowner and Keemie rented a car, during Hurricane Debby, and drove 14 hours back to Maryland.  

They eventually settled on attending St. Frances, the country’s oldest continually operating predominantly African-American Catholic high school, which has produced two of the greatest players ever from Baltimore: Angel McCoughtry and Angel Reese.

The transition has been seamless.

“Khloe’s personality reminds me of Angel Reese, who I coached here for four years. She will challenge anyone, including the coaches, going over every play and wanting to know what she can do better. She’s a natural born leader,” said St. Frances Associate head coach and Dean of Student Engagement Nyteria Burrell. 

“It’s great to have a boisterous point guard that will not back down to anyone, no matter how young she is. We’re not asking her to come in and find her way, we’re asking her to take over, ” 

And Ison has proven up to the task thus far.

“She’s calling me at 6:00 a.m. to open the gym for her, and she’s bringing her teammates with her,” Burrell continued. “She’s the best player on our team right now, her talent is unmatched. Last year, the bus rides were quiet. Now they’re laughing, singing, dancing and being playful. Sometimes I have to say, ‘Chill out! Be quiet!’”

That exuberance and joy was evident from the earliest days of Ison’s sports journey, which started with dance and gymnastics at age four. And from the outset, she was conspicuously different.

“She would watch the older kids for a few minutes, then replicate everything they were doing without any practice,” said Crowner. “We’d be watching her like, ‘Wait, did you just see that?’”

Her hoops journey began similarly. Without any prior training other than shooting around for fun, she tore up a local co-ed basketball league as if she’d been playing for years.

“She was six years old, playing with boys and scoring whenever she wanted to,” said Keemie. 

“Her instincts were different from the other kids,” said Crowner. “It was weird. She already had this advanced basketball IQ. I’d be asking myself, ‘How did she know how to do that?’ Her father and I agreed that we needed to figure out what to do with her.”

As a fourth grader playing against top-rated sixth-grade boys, she stood out. The summer prior to starting fifth grade, at the Battle of the Bull youth tournament in Indian Trail, North Carolina, she and Keemie bopped into the expansive Carolina Courts complex when an unfamiliar man walked past them, stopped dead in his tracks, and yelled, “Khloe!”

Keemie was taken aback. He eyed the stranger skeptically and asked, “How do you know my daughter?”

“I was coaching a boys team in Maryland two years ago and she absolutely killed us,” Caesar Harris, the founder of Triple Threat, a boys team in Howard County, explained. “I’ve been looking for her ever since!”

Harris told Keemie about a new girls squad he was putting together called Lady Threat.

“I’d never seen a kid that young, male or female, who played with that level of skills, intensity, and energy from start to finish,” Harris said, recalling his first glimpse of Ison as a third grader. “I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was living in my brain.”

The inner hunger is natural, latent in Ison’s DNA. It’s an heirloom of sorts, passed down from the difficult circumstances her parents endured. 

Keemie was raised in West Baltimore’s Garrison Boulevard corridor, nurtured by a grandmother who held it down while his father was incarcerated and his mother struggled to maintain her footing. He showed promise as a raw, athletic player at Douglass High School. But he was more interested in the drug game at the time. 

From 2000-2001, he resided in the city jail, which ironically sits ominously across the street from where Ison now attends school at St. Frances. Locked in his cell 22 hours a day, he had the dual gifts of desperation and time.

Upon his release, he worked days sweeping streets for the Downtown Partnership. But on nights and weekends, he was putting in real work against some of the city’s top ballers at the rugged, legendary playground on Dukeland Street known as The Cage. He was offered an invitation to play junior college ball in Kansas solely based on his playground exploits and eventually earned a Division I scholarship to Robert Morris University.   

“Getting that scholarship, I had tears in my eyes,” said Keemie. “I was in a place where I didn’t have to watch my back in college. As I was getting a new chance at life, my boys back home were getting murdered. I had to run back and forth for at least five funerals.”

After one year at Robert Morris, he transferred to play his final college season at Hawaii Pacific University in idyllic Honolulu. Prior to leaving for Hawaii, the debonair college man was at a lounge on Guilford Street when he met a beauty who’d recently graduated from Morgan State. Her friends called her Kiki.

Akilah Crowner also grew up on the west side, with her own hardscrabble story. Her family dynamics fractured when she was nine and placed in foster care. Yet she thrived in school, dedicating her time equally between academics, the xylophone and flute, winning oratorical contests, and excelling in sports.

“I lived in 14 foster homes, seven group homes, and one homeless shelter before I eventually found a foster family in high school that I consider a real mother and father who put their whole soul into me,” said Crowner.

A volleyball, basketball, and track star at Milford Mill High School, Crowner played hoops as a freshman at Essex Community College before transferring to Morgan. The demands of being a teenage mom along with majoring in engineering dashed her college sports dream. She worked full-time as a database engineer to pay for school while also juggling a full undergraduate course load. 

Starting her career in the Information Technology field while Keemie went back to school, the two stayed in touch and connected again a few years later. Ison was born in 2011.

Ison’s parents drive her ambition — when she was a sixth grader playing against high school freshmen, Ison and her father would often be seen doing sunrise conditioning at Lake Montebello, running hills and doing ab work, lunges, push-ups, plyometrics, and calisthenics. 

“Even as the competition got better, she was always one of the best players out there,” said Keemie. “You could see she was special.”

Despite her accolades and burgeoning national profile, Ison is still a young girl, adjusting to the realities of life on the road and away from her family. 

When her mom informed her that she wouldn’t be in attendance to watch her national high school debut in Las Vegas in early October, Ison stood momentarily frozen.

“I told her I was going to her brother’s final homecoming football game at Merrimack College in Massachusetts,” Crowner said. “Khloe didn’t know how to respond.”

The initial shock turned to disbelief. Then denial.  

“Wait, what? Nobody’s coming?” Ison asked through soft sobs.

“I just assumed my mom was going,” Ison later said. “I was upset. Then I thought about my brother, and realized my mom couldn’t be in two places at once. But for the longest time, I guess I thought she could.”

When Akilah called Keemie, they shared a laugh about their daughter’s mini-meltdown. 

“The funny thing is, when we go to her tournaments, she pays us absolutely no mind, like we’re not even there,” said Keemie. 

St. Frances went undefeated in Las Vegas at the Border League in early October. Ison played well despite struggling with a cold, locking down on defense, distributing the ball, and attacking the hoop when a crucial bucket was needed.

She got over the initial shock of not having her parents physically present, FaceTiming them throughout. 

“Sometimes you have to remind yourself that she’s still a young kid who’s gonna do freshman stuff,” said Burrell. “She was missing her parents, being a little clingy, falling asleep in my room before waking up and going back to her own room.” 

“She obviously still has a lot to work on but if she continues on this path, she’ll eventually be the #1 player in the country before her high school career is over.”

Ison’s thinking extends slightly further ahead.

“When I’m finished here, I want to be in the St. Frances Hall of Fame, make an impact on my school and my community, and be the next one to come out of Baltimore and make it far.”

Related

By Todd C. FrankelThe Washington Post

Lindsey Rector added up the costs as she waited for her son to finish his baseball lesson.

That was $60 a week right there. A new bat: $500. His club baseball team in Boynton Beach, Florida, and its three practices a week were $3,000 a year. Out-of-town tournaments cost extra. Last summer, the team traveled to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. This summer, it will be Cooperstown, New York. She figures she spends at least $8,000 a year on baseball for her 12-year-old son, Cruz Thorpe.

She knows he loves the game. She’s less certain she can afford it.

“You’re just trying to do everything you can to make these dreams come true for your child,” Rector said. “But it’s just so money-driven.”

She even tried a GoFundMe campaign to raise some of the $4,000 she’ll need to reach Cooperstown Dreams Park, where preteen baseball teams from across the country flock each summer for weekly tournaments. A single mom working for an online education platform, she felt a little guilty asking for help. But she’s not alone: GoFundMe said “competition travel” was the top sports fundraising cause in 2025.

Youth sports has transformed over the past two decades, shifting from low-cost grassroots programs run mostly by local groups toward a high-priced industry filled with club teams, specialized training and travel tournaments staged at gleaming youth sports complexes – changes fueled, in part, by private equity and venture capital investment.

It’s a supercharged “pay to play” model that promises better opportunities and college recruitment, with little evidence to support it. But parents find it hard to resist, despite the sticker shock.

Many parents are struggling to keep up, according to a survey conducted by the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program in partnership with Utah State University and Louisiana Tech University. Family spending on youth sports jumped 46 percent from 2019 to 2024, the survey found, reaching an estimated $40 billion a year. That’s more than the annual revenues of the NFL and NBA combined.

January 9, 2026

If you’ve been to a San Francisco 49ers home game in recent years, Aubrie Tolliver (SSU ‘16) is a familiar face. Sometimes described as “the voice of Levi’s Stadium,” since 2022 Tolliver has been the in-game host, leading fan contests, on-field promotions, and segments to entertain and inform the in-stadium audiences. Her objective: Engage and energize the crowd to gain home-field advantage for the 49ers.

Tolliver hails from Sunnyvale, California and went to Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, not far from today’s Levi’s Stadium. She comes from a family of 49ers superfans who have been season ticket holders for 50-plus years, making her current game-day role a natural fit. The video below shows Tolliver’s 49ers game-day routine.

Video file:

A self-described “travel ball softball kid,” Tolliver was drawn to Sonoma State by the opportunity to play at the collegiate level. She went on to captain the team as its catcher. While at Sonoma State, she also wrote for the Sonoma Star and developed a passion for sports journalism. 

It was in one of her SSU Communication Studies classes, however, that she found her specific professional inspiration.

“I wanted to be Amy G,” Tolliver said, referring to Amy Gutierrez, the Emmy Award-winning producer and reporter well-known for her work covering the San Francisco Giants. “She came to speak to one of my classes, and I remember thinking, ‘She has exactly the job that I want.’”

Tolliver recalls staying after class to ask Gutierrez, now a lecturer at Sonoma State, what she might do after graduation in order to set herself on a similar path. The advice Gutierrez gave inspired Tolliver to apply to Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she got her Master of Science degree in broadcast and digital journalism.

Tolliver returned to the Bay Area after completing her master’s and went to work as a co-producer and co-anchor of the 49ers’ “Cal-Hi Sports,” a weekly hour-long broadcast covering high school sports across the Bay Area. 

When she is not hyping Levi’s Stadium crowds, she can be found shooting, writing, producing, and editing news and feature stories about youth sports competitions, athletes, and their coaches.  Over her eight-year tenure she has produced more than 500 stories for “Cal-Hi Sports.” 

During the spring and summer – NFL offseason – does she have time to slow down? Not exactly.

Since 2024, Tolliver has also been a game-day host for the Oakland Ballers, the popular independent baseball team across the Bay that plays in the Pioneer League.

“It was really exciting to get involved in this way in the team’s first season, as it taps into my early love of baseball,” Tolliver said.

Learn more about Tolliver’s professional journey in sports broadcasting when she joins SSU alumni for an Industry Insights webinar on February 10.