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Youth Development Initiative

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The Heights Basketball Academy is a nonprofit program of the Youth Development Initiative, currently serving fourth to sixth grade basketball players in the Cleveland Heights area. Our program is gratefully based out of the Cleveland Heights Community Center.

We organize teams and offer group and individual training. In addition to the high-level basketball techniques, we emphasize “effort,” “decision-making” and “focus” as a foundation that is a transferrable mindset for anything that the kids do. In recent years, our teams have won travel leagues, numerous local tournaments and qualified for the AAU Nationals. More importantly, we have a very high retention rate, which to us means that the kids and parents have a good experience in our programs.

Keeping these kids, which have an enormous amount of potential, active in something positive is critical. We believe that there are significant challenges facing the children of our area today: over use of technology/gaming, need for more physical activity, need for greater community involvement, growth of single parent households, and need for greater college preparation planning.

We believe in “activity/site-based” mentoring, we use basketball as our magnet. Our mentors are our coaches and involved parents. Our coaches all receive background checks and are PCA (Positive Coaching Alliance) certified. We take a balanced approach with basketball, while emphasizing development over winning, by respecting all facets of the game we work collectively to master it.

With these dynamics in mind, we created the Heights Basketball Academy in 2010.

We collectively dream of a future where these young men and women are stars in our community, making the better world for future generations that we may never meet. We appreciate your heartfelt financial support of this vision. Heights Basketball Academy

Organizer

Stephanie Leasure
Organizer
Cleveland, OH

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