BALTIMORE — Last month, WMAR-2 News told you about the Leader Breeders STREAM Basketball Summer Camp that had to postpone and scramble to find another location after their building was vandalized.
RELATED:Local summer camp scrambling to find new location after building was vandalized
This week, the Stream Basketball Camp completed their first week of camp thanks to the help of Arlington Elementary School, that stepped up and donated the space for the Leader Breeders to use.
The stream camp was previously planning to host the camp inside the Crispus Attucks Recreation Center before it was vandalized.
However, organizers persevered in the moments of adversity. Co-founder of Leader Breeders Coach Tiny Adams said what looked like a nightmare when their building was vandalized, turned out to be a better situation for the campers and future students.
“We were fortunate enough to have some people come through for us. It’s full circle. For us, you know, we just wanted to operate. So of course, initially, we wanted to do ours four weeks 60 kids, but we had to pivot,” Adams said.
That pivot caused them to minimize the camp to 30 kids instead of 60 and offer two weeks instead of four, but utilizing a 21st-century school to do it.
“So we had to be resilient, get on a scramble and it's been awesome. We've been able to do basketball skill development, academic enrichment with The Ryan Institute, and behavior health with All Walks of Life. We've given them opportunities to do a lot of STEM programming. So they've been on computers, they've been learning how to code their own games,” Adams said.
Some of their additional partners and sponsors include Train with TP, Brand The Builder, DTLR who donated shirts, and Microsoft, who donated computers.
Basketball is part of the main draw for campers however, organizers like Sam Brand who’s the director of Carmelo Anthony’s organization, Team Melo and Team Melo MD23, said the mission is much bigger than just sports.
“We start out with the word of the day and we try to really live by that word through our basketball activities and all the other things that we do. For instance, we started out with respect. And we talked about respecting yourself, respecting others around you. Then we went to confidence. Now lets be confident in who we are. Then we have empathy, to be able to take someone else and understand their situation and care about it. Today was resiliency to get through any adverse situation. So reminding our young people of these words and these philosophies each day. It just lets them know that these actually do help with basketball,” Brand said.
Leader Breeders' instructors also used some lessons from the book “I promise” right out the play book of a sports legend, Lebron James.
“I promise to of course go to school, do all of my homework, listen to my teachers. To always try my best to be helpful and respectful of others to ask questions. These are some of the things that we will want our Baltimore stream participants to live by. As we know, LeBron’s hashtag is strive for greatness, and that's what we want to do here at Baltimore stream,” Adams said.
In addition to the Leader Breeders STREAM Basketball camp being restored, they will now host this same stream basketball development.
During an afterschool program at Arlington Elementary beginning in the fall, students at Arlington can look forward to this program promoting socioeconomic learning, academic support, a commitment to stem literacy and basketball development.
