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After 18 years watching families in his neighborhood go without sports equipment, parks worker Maribel Lopez held onto a small idea and a little budget until the moment was right. Youth sports in the United States costs an average family $1016 per child, according to Aspen Institute’s 2025 State of Play report. The Park Play Lending Library — with soccer balls, volleyballs, yoga mats, and tennis rackets that families can borrow and return like books — quietly opened this summer in East Oakland, California’s Brookfield Village, a neighborhood that waited three decades for its first public pool. In a city where just 14 percent of kids get the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity, compared to the national average of 23 percent, Lopez’s vision also reaches beyond physical health: “We want kids to be able to speak each other’s language and connect through sports,” she said, naming sports fluency as a form of social access most people never think to question. “When kids are familiar with golf, tennis, soccer, and other games or sports that are more socially mobile, then they have access to different communities, different friend groups, different neighborhoods,” she noted. Recreation leader Riles Nganga, who grew up in the same neighborhood, understood it immediately: “I know growing up, I didn’t have access to any of this stuff, so I think us being able to offer that to the community is a great thing.”
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