Kristen Fabick's Blog
25 kids/leaders...16 seats...$10 each....1 skybox / May 7, 03:03 PM
every-so-often..maybe once a month, urban promise gets donated some type of sporting event tickets. sometimes these tickets are used by the urban trekkers (a club for high school kids), sometimes they are used by the after-school program camp directors to take out camp kids (grades 5-8), and sometimes they are used by the street leaders (high school kids that work at the after-school program). sometimes people from the community buy tickets and donate them to UP, and other times the sporting teams and/or venues simply donate a certain number of tickets. in any case, it is great to see the local community supporting the ministry of urban promise and the value that people place on providing opportunities for inner-city kids to see what possibilities lie beyond their block and neighborhood.
a couple months ago, i went with the urban trekkers to a philadelphia soul (indoor football team) game. the tickets had been bough by a corporation called monarch plastics and donated to the trekker program. (monarch plastic also sponsors numerous other events for the trekkers and several of the employees of monarch plastics serve as mentors/sponsors to individual students at urban promise academy.) in addition to the tickets, monarch plastics also provided $20 for each person to spend on food/souveniers/etc. i know prices are ridiculously high at such events ($2.75 for a bottle of water?), but still….$20 is a generous donation.
more recently, urban promise was given 25 tickets to a camden riversharks (minor league baseball team) game for this past friday night—see picture below.
these tickets were not just general admission…they were tickets for the delaware river port authority’s skybox—complete with indoor couches, indoor bar to eat at while watching the game, outdoor patio seating, and a tv on which some of the guys watched the celtics basketball game. why you go to a baseball game to watch a basketball game i don’t know…but they enjoyed both games immensely so that’s all that really matters i suppose. i guess the delaware river port authority donated the tickets…i’m not sure. anyway, each ticketholder was also given $10 in rivershark money (paper coupons that could only be spent at the stadium but were treated just like dollar bills). the prices at this game were slightly lower than at the football game, but you could get a decent dinner (chicken fingers, fries, and a drink) for just under $10.
on friday night, 2 camp directors, 6 interns, a couple street leaders, and 15 kids (25 people total) loaded onto the urban promise bus and headed to the stadium. the skybox only had 16 seats, but that was hardly a problem since most of the time at least 6-10 people were out of the box getting food, playing in the fun zone area for kids, or walking around the stadium taking in all the sights. besides enjoying being at a sporting event where i had room to stand up and walk around and sit down without being in other people’s seats, i think the highlight of my evening was when finley (the riversharks mascot) came into our skybox for a visit. the kids went absolutely nuts (yes…8th graders going nuts over a guy or girl dressed in a shark costume…it was beautiful). one of the kids pulled out his phone and started playing the soulja boy song “crank that”. (if you don’t know the song…that’s ok…it was really, really popular in the fall, and soulja boy does a pretty neat dance that all the kids have learned.) so the song started playing and finley started doing the dance! at least as best as he/she could in a shark suit. the kids totally lost it then. i think some of them were on the floor laughing.
every friday night, the riversharks have a fireworks show at the end of their game. the amount and quality of the fireworks really surprised me. i think the show lasted for about 10 minutes. here is a picture.
i really enjoyed watching the baseball game, but more than that, i enjoyed watching the kids enjoy the game and the atmosphere. i hope that i have more opportunities to take kids to events like this in the summer.
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