High school coach sets up nonprofit to help kids in need with extracurriculars

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

Landen Cummings, East High School's varsity head basketball coach, has established the LEAP Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at assisting children who cannot afford extracurricular activities.
The foundation intends to support kids in sports, music, and computer programming by having parents submit grades and children write about their extracurricular interests.

SALT LAKE CITY — One of the state's high school basketball coaches has a plan to help kids who can't afford sports and other extracurricular activities — a nonprofit he hopes will eventually go statewide.

Landen Cummings, varsity head basketball coach at East High School, has created the LEAP Foundation, which stands for Learn, Earn and Progress.

"It's kind of like an introduction to a scholarship," Cummings told KSL-TV on Monday. "Ideally, what we want is for kids to earn good grades, and we'll help pay for extracurricular activities, sports, computer programming classes, musical instrument classes and anything they do outside of school that costs money."

Cummings described a process that involved parents submitting grades and kids writing a paragraph about why they like the extracurricular activities, and the nonprofit would pick kids to help based on some of those factors.

Seeing a need up close

The first-year head coach said he was inspired to create the nonprofit after seeing the need firsthand — including kids who showed up to basketball camp from the Glendale area.

"We had a few kids show up, and they had jeans on and said they didn't have basketball shorts, and some of the kids showed up in sandals and said that they only had one pair of shoes, and they could only wear those shoes to school," Cummings said. "And they're just playing off of natural athleticism, but they haven't been taught the game."

Cummings said initially the fledgling nonprofit aimed to help the Glendale kids, but he intended to expand the foundation's reach statewide as it connected with individuals, groups and organizations looking to help grow the cause.

He hoped ultimately the LEAP Foundation nonprofit would make a difference for many children.

"I never want kids to miss out on the opportunity to play sports because of money," Cummings said.

Cummings said anyone interested in getting involved with the LEAP Foundation could reach him at 801-432-0520 or leapfoundation24@gmail.com.

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