Of course they see themselves in those kids. The same intense eyes. Youthful legs pitched on toes, wanting to spring into the action their coach demands.

Wanting to be part of a team. To learn. To excel.

Some 700 boys and girls, age 5 to 13, spread out across 65 teams, are working hard with their coaches this month to open the basketball season of the Kansas City Public Schools’ Elementary Sports League.

“I was one of them, once upon a time,” says Kenneth “Pooh” Oliver, coach of LINC’s team at Banneker Elementary School, between practice drills.

Right now, the kids surely know they’re learning the game, learning how to get in shape, hoping to impress.

But there’s so much more to why KCPS is partnering with LINC, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City and Della Lamb to build the new elementary schools sports league.

“This game kept me out of a lot of trouble,” Oliver said. It was “my comfort zone . . . it opened a lot of doors for me.”

He and many other coaches draw the same line from their hopes for the kids on their teams, through their own experiences and back to the mentors who guided them.

Waymond King, Senior Director of Healthy Lifestyles with the Boys and Girls Clubs and one of the organizers of the league, remembers young “Pooh” as a kid learning the game when King was helping then-Mayor Emanuel Cleaver II’s Night Hoops program in the early 1990s.

And that takes King to his childhood in the 1970s — when he as a teenager and he and his friends would “religiously” get out to the gym at 43rd Street and Cleveland Avenue at 8 a.m. on Saturday mornings to learn the game from the local great players of his day in pickup games.

“Rudy Liggins . . . Clay Johnson . . . Calvin Wainright . . .”

King names them and more. Somewhere along the way, he knows, looking back, the lessons went beyond basketball.

“They became mentors and role models for us,” he said. “They helped us become better citizens and helped us understand what it took to become a collegiate athlete.”

The sports league — which plans to add other sports in season such as volleyball, soccer, baseball, softball and golf — means to use the games as that “hook” to turn the kids and their families on to new opportunities in academic and social growth, just like the games lifted the people who are their coaches today.

“It’s an extension of our experience growing up,” King said.

There is a wider vision in the school district’s plans with these partnerships, said Nyala Bulock, KCPS’s assistant athletic director.

It starts with the fundamentals she has seen in some of the early practices, and the care of the coaches pouring over them.

“You see them understanding what it is to be on a team,” she said, “to understand coaching style . . . getting comfortable.”

It’s a big dream, she says, that the hub of this partnership helps connect the program and KCPS’s kids with more partners, like the Royals, Chiefs, Current and Sporting KC. And that the community engages more in the growth of the students, athletically and academically.

Then, as these children mature, the middle school and high school sports programs can grow in size and confidence, opening more opportunities for the students and their families.

”We have the talent,” Bulock said. “We have the students. We have the drive. They want it, but they just never experienced it. But once they get a taste of it, I say, watch out.”

The games are being hosted by the Boys and Girls Club’s Thornberry Unit at 43rd and Cleveland Ave., and by the Kansas City Public Schools at Central High School, with weekday practices occurring at various elementary schools and community sites throughout the city.

LINC’s leadership among its many Caring Communities sites in schools throughout the area includes a substantial number of ex-basketball players, many of them mentored by Wainright, himself a community leader with LINC who died in 2022.

LINC Caring Communities Supervisor Jason Ervin is one of those who says basketball helped him “get out of the streets.”

LINC was eager to help create the league’s partnership, Ervin said, for the kids, their families and the community.

“We all serve the same youth,” he said. “I’m hoping we can get our community back involved with sports and then know how vital it is . . . because their grades will get better, their self-esteem. They’ll get to know kids in the community and learn how to compete and have fun.”

To volunteer

Apply online at kcpublicschools.galaxydigital.com

The coaches are all volunteers, King said. “It may sound a bit corny, but it’s a labor of love.”

Coach T. L. Foster has his own competitive AAU team that he coaches, plus time coaching at the high school level and semi-pro women’s basketball. But he’s making time to volunteer with the kids at King Elementary School.

He’s inspired by his dad, who was a youth and teen sports director at a YMCA in the South Bronx, New York City, who showed him “how to be a better basketball player and how to be a better person.”

He wants basketball to be for these kids what it has been for him:

“My self-care,” he said. “When I was stressed I’d go shoot some baskets. If I was down . . . if I was sad . . . it was always there for me.”

Back on the floor of the gym at Banneker Elementary, Oliver is whistling the kids through new drills. It’s supposed to be somewhat hard. Challenging. They don’t always get it right. Sometimes attention lapses. Sometimes extra laps get run.

“I was one of those kids,” Oliver says again. “I see the smiles on their faces. That’s why I do this.”

He remembers the feeling when he was learning, playing for those coaches who he knew wanted the best out of him.

“I was one of those kids that if I saw someone giving back,” he said, “it just made me feel loved.”

Bulock knows there are many other partners and people out in the community that can be a part of this new energy in the school district and help it grow.

“The papa out there, or a grandmother, or someone who’s had experience in sports that could give back by mentoring our kids — we want that,” she said.

“Stay involved with us,” she said. “Believe in us.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer