Net gain: Teens revitalize basketball court as gathering place

In LaFargeville, a small community north of Watertown, New York, almost everything is within walking distance of the school grounds. Everything except a safe, clean place for teens to gather.

Now, a group of young people are revitalizing a long-neglected basketball court near the school with help from Cornell programs that develop their advocacy and leadership skills. Their hope is the court will become a new hotspot for young people in the community.

"It's very run down. The pavement is cracked, it's trashed and some of the hoops don't even have nets in them," said Ella Hunneyman, a senior at LaFargeville Central School. "We wanted to fix it up so the community would want to actually go there and use it."

With help from Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) Jefferson County and Cornell experts, the teens are working with the Town of Orleans, New York, to resurface the court, make the parking lot safer, improve drainage, install lighting nearby and organize youth volunteers to maintain the site. On Sept. 16, they plan to install more lighting and paint and stain benches and flower boxes that they built themselves, as the first back-to-school initiative on the project this year.

In time, the Cornell teams hope to replicate the youth advocacy model with CCE programs throughout the state.

"When you see the kids making a difference and how they feel by doing so, it's everything," said Donna Coleman, one of four CCE community schools coordinators in school districts serving Jefferson and Lewis counties.

The idea began in spring 2024, when Coleman created a Youth Voice Leadership Committee at LaFargeville Central School with the support of the Fort Drum Full-Service Community Schools Consortium. She helps teenagers on the committee advocate for their interests in school, from hosting events and petitioning the superintendent for hygiene products in the locker rooms to leadership camps and college visits. Students on the committee wanted to improve the basketball court, which is owned by the Town of Orleans.

They got help formulating a plan from Janet Loebach, the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professor in Child Development in the College of Human Ecology. Loebach and Kimberly Kopko, Ph.D. '05, associate director of CCE, had invited CCE 4H educators across the state to participate in a program they have spearheaded, funded for multiple years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, called Youth-Friendly Communities to Support Positive Youth Development. Three years in the making, the project aims to empower youth to assess their community's outdoor spaces and improve them to better support young people's needs and development.

Coleman let them know the LaFargeville Youth Voice Leadership Committee's idea fit perfectly. Now LaFargeville is the first cohort of youth participating.

"We are delivering a comprehensive multistage youth workshop program, with an embedded tool kit, through which we are empowering young people to evaluate the youth-friendliness of their communities, and then lead and advocate for the changes and actions they would like to see," Loebach said.

They aim to work with 10 to 12 groups of youth across New York State by the end of the project funding in 2027. It will also be available publicly online so youth-serving organizations can tap into the resource.

First Loebach met with the teens and toured the court. "The students were very clear, very articulate right from the beginning, about what they wanted to see, so we were able to hit the ground running with them," Loebach said.

Then she guided them through activities, like an environmental audit and a photo collection exercise, to help zero in on the specific changes they wanted to see and to develop their pitch to the Town of Orleans board and the Youth Commission, a local volunteer organization that promotes sports and cultural programming in the community.

The teens got a spot of luck when pitching to the commission. It was already eyeing the park for renovations too, said Tyler Lashomb, president of the commission.

"Every idea that they threw out, it was like they were reading our minds," he said.

The more intimidating pitch was to the Town of Orleans board, the students said. "It was pretty nerve-wracking going from people in our school to people who are in charge of the town," said Alexander Moore, a junior who joined the Youth Committee in ninth grade.

But Loebach's tools helped the students prioritize their requests and effectively propose them.

"It was good to learn how to pitch ideas and talk to people who have the same idea as you and to work together to achieve the same goal," Hunneyman said.

The pitch worked. The town improved drainage on the walkway to the courts in a spot students identified as swampy and painted fresh parking lines in the court lot for safety. The students convinced them to add lighting in the school parking lot too. And the Youth Commission is now working to secure a New York State Parks and Recreation grant to resurface the courts.

"When young people know they've genuinely been heard and listened to, we see long-term positive impacts," Loebach said. "We actually see youth being more civically engaged when they have these positive experiences, which can extend into adulthood."

For example, the students reached out to local hardware stores for donations to build the benches and flower boxes. They also planned a rotation of crews to check on and clean the park. "If we want to keep it looking nice and a safe place where people feel comfortable going and hanging out," said Hunneyman, "we know we're going to have to put in the work as well."

Kopko will meet with parents of the youth involved once the project wraps up this fall, to see how much they heard about it from their children, and what kind of support they offered. Discussions with parents will help raise their awareness of the importance of youth-friendly community spaces and activities, and the value of projects led by young people, Kopko said.

She and Loebach are now working with 4H and CCE parent educators in Tompkins and Orange counties to potentially launch similar projects, to test the tool kit in a variety of school settings, from urban to rural. By the end of the project in 2026 they hope to have worked with up to a dozen 4H youth groups across the state.

The youth advocacy program illustrates CCE's mission: to provide New York residents with research-based information from a source families trust, Kopko said.

"We're there, we're involved, we're engaged. We're getting to know the people," Kopko said. "It's not just putting out a research brief or a parent page someone can download and read. It's human interaction that's based on research."

The students are already thinking about how they can use the skills they've learned to improve their community in other ways. Samuel Duffany, a junior who had never attended a town board meeting before, says he is now considering running for the town board someday.

"The youth represent a major portion of the town's population," Duffany said. "It's good to have their ideas expressed."

Kaitlyn Serrao is a senior media relations specialist in University Communications.