Phillylacrosse.com, Posted 12/17/19
From US Lacrosse
Since its formation in 2011, Harlem Lacrosse has featured dramatic growth that has helped the organization reach more and more at-risk children each year.
What started as one program in Harlem serving 35 children, has grown to serve over 1,300 children in 30 programs in five cities.
This mission of Harlem Lacrosse is simple in principle: to empower the children who are most at risk for academic decline and dropout to rise above their challenges and reach their full potential.
The reality is that it takes a lot of hard work to succeed in the mission.
“These are complex issues that involve the U.S. educational system, poverty and a number of other factors,” said Mike Levin, CEO of Harlem Lacrosse.
To help plan its approach to tackling those challenges, the full Harlem Lacrosse staff from its five cities — New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia (three locations, high school and middle school) and Los Angeles — recently gathered at US Lacrosse headquarters in Sparks, Md., for a two-day retreat.
“I saw pictures of the facility and thought it would be a good space for us, and it’s also a chance to open up the dialogue with US Lacrosse,” Levin said.
Levin, an All-American goalie at Brown who won a pair of Major League Lacrosse championships, is well versed in the challenges facing Harlem Lacrosse. He previously served as the CEO of Metro Lacrosse in Boston and was a co-founder of City Lacrosse in Los Angeles before taking on his current role with Harlem Lacrosse.
Harlem Lacrosse recently adopted a new strategic plan for 2020-23 and one of the core tenets of its strategy is vertical growth versus horizontal.
Harlem’s programs are predominantly run through middle schools which sometimes leaves players with no place to continue playing the sport as they move on to high school. That’s why the organization is trying to ensure a pathway for its participants to keep playing the sport by creating lacrosse programs at the high schools in their current locations versus expanding to new markets.
As is, the Harlem Lacrosse model is achieving success. Its participants are graduating high school (89 percent) at rates above the national average and significantly above the rates for minorities and low-income students. Eighty percent of Harlem Lacrosse graduates are enrolling in college and they are beginning to make their mark on the lacrosse field as well.
This past spring, Dy-Jae Pearson played in six games for Bryant University, becoming the first Harlem Lacrosse alum to play at the Division I level.
With the organization still relatively young, Levin sees success stories like Pearson becoming more common. The bulk of Harlem Lacrosse’s alumni base are still very early in their high school years and have a world of opportunity in front of them.
To learn more about Harlem Lacrosse, please visit its website at harlemlacrosse.org (Philly) – https://www.harlemlacrosse.org/philadelphia.
