The PCA Blog - Los Angeles

What a Weekend!

09.02.2015

Notes on a highly impactful weekend for PCA-Los Angeles from Chapter Executive Director Alan Berkes 

At 9am on Saturday August 29, it was already 90+ degrees in East LA, when more than 150 coaches from the LA’s Best after-school program participated in a Positive Motivation workshop facilitated by PCA's Director of Training, Ruben Nieves.

The young, mobile-phone friendly coaches used our text-to-sign-in program, available thanks to SportUp, whose executives, Drew Payne and Stephen Minix, were in the house. Also mixing it up with the coaches were PCA-LA Trainers Ray, Nick, Marc and aspiring Trainer Candidates Rachael and Vage.

As our first LA84-funded workshop in years, it was a great start to a new partnership we are developing for LA84 Foundation grantees. Thirty miles away veteran PCA Trainer Jim Perry was impacting Tustin High School Volleyball players with a Triple-Impact Competitor® workshop, which one student-athlete "will never forget” as he later wrote in an e-mail to us.

On Sunday PCA-LA teamed up with the LA Sparks and participated in their #WEARE event, helping break the WNBA record for attendance. PCA and SportUp had a booth at the Sparks' outdoor festival, and another veteran Trainer, Ray Lokar, led a modified Positive Motivation Workshop for 16 adults and 40 athletes inside the (thankfully!) air-conditioned Staples Center. The attendees were a mixed group of high school and youth athletes, coaches, parents and supporters.

Ray was flawless. I want thank him and also PCA-LA Partnership Manager Marti Reed for helping me pull this event together at an incredibly busy time. Marti was literally on the phone conducting business with one hand and managing our booth and greeting attendees with the other.

Our thanks go to SportUp for buying the booth and supplying the game tickets and the bulk of attendees. Their partnership is invaluable to us and we are extremely grateful. Thank you to our Board Chair, Ellen Robbins, for bringing in and hosting potential partners in the Sidley Austin Suite, and to Board Member Veera Asher for bringing in supporters and entertaining the kids, and to Board Member Jeff Serota for attending his first PCA event.

And a huge thank you to Board Member and Sparks President Christine Simmons for allowing us to invade Staples on the Sparks' special day. The team -- on and off the court -- is first class.

All in all, we exposed PCA to athletes, coaches, parents and leaders from Animo Ralph Bunche Girls Basketball, Animo South Los Angeles Girls Basketball, Hermosa Beach Youth Basketball, Juggle The World Soccer, the Watts Bears, EngineCo, Velocity Sports, KIPP Schools, Wasserman Media Group, AEG and thousands of Sparks fans.

PCA's workshops have been called "transformative" and "life-changing."

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