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Home > Bison Media Zone > Second annual Maris All-Star Week brings advent of year-long Youth Academy
Podcast: Bison Media Zone
Episode:

Second annual Maris All-Star Week brings advent of year-long Youth Academy
Category: Sports & Recreation
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2022-04-27 13:00:00
Description: FARGO The middle school student arrived at a youth basketball camp during Roger Maris All-Star Week last year, but wasn’t playing. It didn’t take long for organizers to realize the problem.

All the kid had on his feet was flip flops.



“He literally didn’t have any shoes,” said Joel Vettel, head of strategic community partnerships for Sanford Health.



That perhaps was the beginning of a conversation with the Maris family in the planning of the second annual event, scheduled June 13-19 at various locations in the Fargo-Moorhead area.



The result was the advent of the Roger Maris Youth Academy, which in conjunction with the Fargo Boys and Girls Club will take 30 local middle school students and mentor them for a year. That thought originally began as a one-day event, but Vettel said it was obvious one afternoon wasn’t nearly enough.



One day turned to 365 days.



“We’re doing stuff for a lot of kids,” said Roger Maris Jr., “but we felt like the kids that didn’t have the opportunity that other kids had, we could do something further through education and life skills and put them on a different path.”



The Boys and Girls Club is constructing the one year curriculum that will include a partnership with the Fargo Moorhead West Fargo Chamber of Commerce to expose kids to various businesses. It will be funded from a portion of the sponsorship dollars raised by the Maris event.



Like last year, Sanford Health is absorbing all expenses with money raised going toward the Roger Maris Cancer Center and local youth development. The plan for the Youth Academy is to have graduation for the 30 kids at the following year’s event.



It’s part of the transformation from the long-standing Maris golf tourney that began in 1985 to more of a community outreach. Moreover, the hope is to bring Maris All-Star week to nationwide exposure status with the Cancer Center being a national destination for treatments.



“We have big ideas and plans down the road to try and mushroom this thing,” Maris Jr. said.



Planners added softball to the mix of youth clinics that include basketball, football, baseball, golf and hockey. Each clinic is free and will be conducted by local high school and college coaches.



In the case of last year’s hockey clinic, a few NHL players happen to show up thanks to Matt Cullen, who will return as one of the celebrity athletes to work youth camps along with Brock Lesnar, Kent Hrbek, Paul Molitor and Chad Greenway.



The 18-hole scramble golf tournament returns for the 38th year and will be held at Rose Creek Golf Course. For the second straight year, a nine-hole scramble event is set at Osgood Golf Course.



“I always felt there was more we could do to make it bigger and more of a community event,” Maris Jr. said. “Dad played baseball so baseball was an avenue we could branch off into. We got together with Sanford, started kicking around ideas on how we could make things more of a community thing versus just golf. The natural thing was to take the asset that we had and make it into something bigger and better.”



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