Youth Sports Alliance doing what it does best: Get out and play

YSA's Get Out And Play at Park City Mountain in March. Photo: Youth Sports Alliance

PARK CITY, Utah. — Friday will mark the finish of one stage for Park City’s Youth Sports Alliance (YSA), and Saturday will mark the initiation of the next stage, an action known by savvy alpine skiers as finitiation (of one turn to the next).

The Get Out and Play (GOAP) program wrapped up winter after-school classes and successfully serviced students receiving beginning to intermediate instruction. Sports aside, theater, ballet, and all the other creative classes were safely conducted outside.

“I think it would have been easy to close up shop this year and say it was too hard to run programs, but we saw the need in the community and knew we had to make them happen for our kids,” Youth Sport Alliance Executive Director Emily Fisher said. “We didn’t exactly know all of the details of how the programs were going to run, but we did know that all of the students had been stuck inside on their screens for way too long.  It was time to get them outside to have fun.”

Volunteers are the lifeblood of GOAP programs, pandemic or no pandemic, and this year was no different. After all, misplaced mittens don’t just find themselves.

Park City Mountain, Woodward, Deer Valley Resort, Utah Olympic Park, White Pine Nordic and Soldier Hollow Nordic hosted the students, who hail from Summit and Wasatch counties. No gear, no problem, as Switchback Sports provided scholarship applicants with all the needed equipment.

It’s World Championships season, and the member teams and alumni athletes of the nonprofit YSA that make up the now famous Park City Nation are well-represented around the clock and around the globe. Included are athletes like Paige Jones competing today in ski jumping in Germany and Wes Campbell competing today in Biathlon in Austria in the Jr. World Championships.

The hard-working staff at YSA now turn their focus towards registration of GOAP spring activities.

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