It was a tight one Saturday between Fruitridge and Highlands at The Nest on the Sacramento State campus, the two middle-school-age squads facing off in the Kings and Queens Rise summer basketball league’s season-ending championship game.
“It feels like the NBA, kids-style,” Fruitridge parent Necole McRae said, watching the middle-schoolers from the stands, while waiting for daughter Ahmaari’s high-school-age squad to take the court. “You’re not just cheering for your team, you’re cheering for good plays on both sides.”
A title was on the line, but the annual summer league, a project of The Center At Sierra Health Foundation’s Black Child Legacy Campaign program, in partnership with My Brother’s Keeper and the Sacramento Kings, is about more than bragging rights. The league is wrapping up its seventh year, spawned in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Stephon Clark in 2018.
It’s eight weeks of play and learning for more than 350 kids, grades 4 through 11, under-girded by a serious mission: reducing the numbers of deaths of Black boys and girls in Sacramento County.
Black children die at twice the rate of other ethnicities in Sacramento County. The greatest proportion of deaths — 32% — is a result of third-party homicides, whether by gun violence or drugs; gang involvement or other violent crime, according to Sacramento County, which commissioned a blue-ribbon report to get to the root causes of the deaths.
The Black Child Legacy Campaign is working with other community groups and through programs such as Kings and Queens Rise to keep youth out of harm’s way, allow them to make new friends and seek out trusted adults.
Their focus: the Sacramento neighborhoods with the highest numbers of Black child deaths in the county: Arden Arcade; Del Paso Heights and North Sacramento; Foothill Farms and North Highlands; Fruitridge and Stockton Boulevard; Meadowview, Oak Park and Valley Hi. Two-dozen neighborhood teams led by Black Child Legacy Campaign partners make up the league.
“It’s part of our strategy to reduce the death toll of young Black men and women here in Sacramento. It’s about having fun but (also) to interrupt and divert these youth from harming each other and to see each other as human beings,” said James Willock, of Sacramento non profit Mutual Assistance Network and the Black Child Legacy Campaign’s Healing the Hood project.
Healing the Hood’s goal, to decrease community violence through intervention and programs like Kings and Queens Rise.
“We know basketball builds those bonds,” said league commissioner Kenneth Duncan, who heads the Sacramento youth development nonprofit Ball Out Academy. “Maybe one day, one of these kids will be at a high school function or at a party and there might be an issue, but they’ll say, ‘Oh, I remember you from Kings and Queens,’ and that should put some fires out around the city.”
This summer was the third for Laylarae Blake, a 17-year-old Center High School junior from Foothill Farms. Her aunt found out about the summer basketball league from social media. A cousin was the first to join the league.
“I’m meeting new people, playing the sport I love with people who love it, too,” Blake said. “It helps your mental state. You don’t have to worry about everything at home. You just worry about basketball and what you’re going to do on the court.”
It’s a safe space with trusted adults where for a few hours on a Saturday, the only thing that matters is what’s happening on the court; the only drama, who’ll come out on top at the final whistle.
“We want to create a space for youth to play basketball and to be connected to the community and to resources,” said Jedida Gomes, a Sierra Health project manager. “It’s that off ramp to someone they can call on.”