Archive: Around Town

Lansing Recreation Department Director Steve Colt announced that Dick's Sporting Goods would be donating equipment to the baseball and softball programs for the second year this Spring.  The company is donating equipment for the teams, plus discount coupons for the coaches, and special coupons for the players to buy baseball or softball equipment such as gloves, bats, shoes, apparel, and training aids. "There is obviously some benefit to them in advertising, but if that works for them that's great!" says Colt.  "Because it's working for us."

Colt says he was contacted unexpectedly last year by the corporate office.  He says he was skeptical at first, but was soon convinced that the donation comes with no strings attached.  Last year the company donated good quality equipment bags, water bottles for the kids, batting helmets, dry marker boards -- a coaching aid for positioning, score books, and about a dozen balls.  This year Colt says the donation is a little smaller, but still quite generous.


Colt also got a call from the corporate office at Tops Markets looking for sponsorship opportunities.  Colt says sponsorships are difficult to accept in the town program.  "Sponsorship is a really tricky thing to handle when you're running in-house programs," he says.  "It can come and go, and who is to get what?  On the local level it is sometimes not the greatest thing, even though it's a very generous offer."

But he did have an idea.  "When we pack up our team's equipment we pack them in brown paper grocery bags," he says.  "It's not flashy, but it's functional.  It's kind of like we are, not flashy but functional."

"I said, 'You may laugh at me, but there is something you can help us with.  We use your brown paper shopping bags to pack virtually everything.'" Colt recalls.  "She said, 'Well I never heard of that one, but I'll see what I can do.'"


Colt asked for a few hundred bags, but the company responded by donating 1,000.  Local manager Bob Clinton had two palettes worth of bags waiting when Colt went to the local store to pick them up the other day.  Only half would fit in his car, so he will make a second trip to get the rest.

Dick's Sporting Goods is a Binghamton-based company that has grown to more than 250 stores since it opened there in 1948. The corporation's Community Youth Sports Program will donate over 50,000 coach's equipment kits to local youth baseball, football, soccer, basketball, lacrosse and hockey programs this year.  They say these donations will touch more than a million children.

Tops Markets donated more than $11.7 million last year to a variety of not-for-profit organizations, including the Children's Miracle Network, Buffalo Alliance for Education, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Salvation Army, regional food banks and other causes.


Tuesday Colt and his staff made 100 phone calls to parents of potential players to make sure that everyone who wants to play will be included.  " It's a lot of extra work to make the calls, but it is so much better to do it now, before you establish the teams so that you know your pool of players is good," he explains.  "It's better than making the teams and getting everything prepared, and then having twenty kids come out later.  That's a nightmare, because we're not in the 'no' business.  We want to include everybody."

The result is that about 300 kids will participate in this Spring's program.  Donations for the sports programs on this scale are new to the Recreation Department.  But they will go a long way toward enriching the Lansing Baseball Program (LBP) and Lansing Softball Program (LSP). 

"This really came out of the blue," Colt says.  "It's kind of crazy, but the bags are an integral part of how we get our equipment out to our volunteer coaches, so it was very helpful.  We got that around the same time as the people from Dick's called, so it was like early Christmas."

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