“We provide the balls,” Arlene Virga says. Robust and energetic, Virga is a die-hard Yankees fan, devoted mother of three, nursery school teacher, and the executive director of the Yorkville Youth Athletic Association. The balls she’s referring to are, of course, basketballs, baseballs, footballs, and tennis balls.
While she’s being a bit cheeky, in actuality, to run one of the largest community-based sports programs for kids in the city, Virga and her team orchestrate a complicated logistical enterprise that insures that more than 6,000 children a year have access to sports leagues and programs, places to play them in, and quality umpires, referees, and coaches to make sure it all runs smoothly.
“More than anything, I’m doing this so children can have a good time,” Virga says. “I think I’m the person I am today because I played sports when I was a kid, and I try to make it so our kids have the same kind of positive experiences.”
Think of that classic childhood rite of passage when a child becomes part of a team thanks to Little League, a youth basketball program, or any other organized sport. In the city, it’s organizations like Yorkville (as YYAA is commonly referred to) that make those experiences possible. And what’s really wonderful is that they do it in a way that often allows parents to be involved as well. “It’s the grass roots feel that makes [the organization] unique. That’s the part I love,” Virga says.
In Yorkville’s recreational leagues and programs, much of the coaching is handled by dedicated parent volunteers, with support and supervision from the organization. And, of course, many of the parents who aren’t coaching can be found on the sidelines rooting for their kids. It’s parent-child bonding of the highest order.
“It was my first time as a coach, and I went into it with reservations. Between my own years in youth sports and reporting on athletes who were coached by their parents, I had decided it wasn’t a good idea,” says NYC dad and sports writer Joe Drape about his experience coaching flag football last fall at Yorkville. “But [my son] asked me to, and I had been around really good coaches for my last two books and saw firsthand what an impact they made on young people.” The books Drape is referring to are Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen and Soldiers First: Duty, Honor, Country and Football at West Point.
And the result of his venture into coaching? “It was rewarding beyond any of my expectations—not only having the time and common goal with my son, but also being able to put my theories on what makes for a positive sports experience to the test,” Drape says. “At 7 and 8, these kids just want to be encouraged and be part of the team and to have fun.”
Testimony like this is exactly what Virga lives for. “You should hear the spiel we tell coaches about sportsmanship,” she says. “We do not care about whether you win or not. We’re teaching these kids about skill, character, teamwork. That’s what’s important to us.”
Virga herself was a parent volunteer at Yorkville for seven years when her children were young, so she’s particularly proud of the way the organization—which was founded in 1968 as an all-volunteer group—still has a great deal of hands-on parental involvement today. In fact, she already had a very active volunteer role at Yorkville as the director of Youth Programming when the organization first started to pay her in 2005. Two years later, she became the executive director. Remarkably, it’s not her only day job; for the last 20 years, Virga has been a full-time nursery school teacher, after years of teaching physical education.
Under her leadership, Yorkville’s growth has been literally exponential, and these days she oversees a staff of 10 full-time employees and 19 part-timers, who run programs for children from pre-K through high school in eight sports as well as in theater arts and afterschool programs. Baseball and basketball take the lead in popularity, and flag football is quickly gaining ground as the third most sought after activity. Their other sports offerings include dodgeball, hockey, lacrosse, soccer, and tennis.
It varies from sport to sport, but what Yorkville likes to do is offer different kinds of options within a sport, so children of varying interests and talents can find the right place for themselves. In baseball, for example, some children regardless of age will prefer recreational leagues where teams are coached by parents, while other baseball kids opt for more serious and time-consuming tracks through Yorkville’s Developmental League and Travel Baseball program, both of which have paid coaches with deep backgrounds in baseball.
While Yorkville is predominantly a sports organization, its afterschool programs include academic as well as recreational activities. And it also has a thriving theater program, the Yorkville Youth Theatre Ensemble, now in its tenth year. The program teaches theater arts like singing, acting, and dance to children in grades 2-5 and in grades 6-10, with classes that culminate in a big end-of-semester performance.
Kids come from all over the city to participate in Yorkville programs, but its biggest block of families by far is from the Upper East Side, where the organization was originally founded with the goal of giving boys, primarily from the Yorkville section of the neighborhood, an opportunity to play baseball. The gender lapse has long since been corrected, and one measure of how deeply embedded the group is in the community is that its essential infrastructure—all its leagues and programs—are run in school gyms and parks and fields throughout the area. Another sign of its presence is its pervasive logo. Walk around the Upper East Side on a pleasant weekend day and you’ll be all but guaranteed to spot a child wearing a Yorkville hat or jersey.
As a not-for-profit with a community-minded ethos, Yorkville also offers something else that many parents appreciate: affordable prices.
“We want everyone to play sports,” Virga says. “So we offer scholarships and financial aid, and we try to make sure that our prices are the lowest around.”
Virga and her staff do much of their planning, coordinating, and brainstorming out of their basement office in a neighborhood brownstone. Virga tries to make sure they’re staying current with what families want. The most recent sport to be added to the menu was lacrosse. Lately, some parents have asked about wrestling and archery, but she seems to suggest that they are fleeting possibilities.
Over the years, Virga has seen thousands of kids pass through her programs, and while she doesn’t know them all, many of them know who she is because of her regular presence at Yorkville games. Recently on a warm September afternoon, she was riding the crosstown bus at East 86th Street when she was spotted. “I get on the bus and all of the sudden, all these boys start talking to me like I’m the best looking woman they’ve ever seen,” she explains. “It was kids from one of the leagues. They wanted to tell me how well their team is doing. They know me. They know I’m there for them. It made me so happy.”
To learn more, visit yyaa.org.
