BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
Youth sports in the United States now cost the average family about $1,016 a year per child, up 46 percent since 2019, according to the Aspen Institute’s 2025 State of Play report. In Oakland, where just 14 percent of kids get the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity, compared to a national average of 23 percent, that number matters.
Maribel Lopez spent 18 years working for Oakland’s parks and recreation department watching that play out. When she had budget left at the end of the year, she decided to do something with it.
What the library actually is
The Park Play Lending Library opened July 11 at the Larry E. Reid Sports Center in Brookfield Village, just south of the Coliseum in East Oakland. The setup is exactly what it sounds like: check out a soccer ball or jump rope, take it to the park, bring it back. Footballs, volleyballs, yoga mats, and tennis equipment are in the rotation. People asked for board games, so those are in there now too.
“The library is just at the beginning stages right now,” said Riles Nganga, a recreation leader at the center. “Everything isn’t even here yet, so we still want to get spike ball out here. Anything that can get people outside, outdoors, moving and not being in the house sedentary.”
The neighborhood it was built for
Brookfield Village has fewer parks, less green space, and fewer city resources than most Oakland neighborhoods, but a lot of kids.
The sports center has been filling that kind of gap for a while. When it opened in 2011, it brought the first public pool to the neighborhood since 1976. For the three decades in between, families made do with a contaminated estuary nearby. “Kids were talking about being Olympic gold-medal swimmers but we had nowhere to learn,” community representative Jacquee Castain said in 2009, two years before the pool finally opened.
Maria Garcia works the front desk at the center and hears the same thing about equipment. “Parents are trying to keep food on the table, but also navigate being able to have their kids go to things and participate in things, and sometimes, it can be difficult,” she said. “And I think having resources like this kind of opens up that door for them to be able to do that.”
What sparked this ingenious idea?
Tool-lending libraries have been running in Oakland and Berkeley for years: you borrow a drill the same way you’d borrow a book, use it, bring it back. Lopez saw the same logic applying to a soccer ball.
She noticed families kept showing up at the center asking to borrow equipment, especially as summer approached. She held onto the idea until she had a little budget left and a reason to move on it.
Her case for why this matters goes beyond physical activity. “We’re aware that sports can lead to social mobility,” she told SFGATE. “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, and we want to be a vehicle for that. We want kids to be able to speak each other’s language and connect through sports.”
Nganga, who grew up in Brookfield Village, didn’t need much convincing. “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.”
What happens next
This is a pilot. If it holds here, the plan is one lending library per Oakland district, each stocked based on what that community asks for. Partnerships with local sports organizations are in the works too.
The World Cup renewed a familiar conversation this year about cost being the wall between American kids and competitive youth sports. A lending library in East Oakland doesn’t knock that wall down. But the idea that a ball you can borrow is as useful as one you own is simple, cheap, and replicable, and it’s already in the hands of kids who didn’t have one before.
Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.
