2020 July

Hello and happy summer!

How are you doing? Girls Play Sports staff, volunteers and community partners miss seeing our young participants and volunteers and hope you are all doing well.

During the past few months, we’ve been busy providing resources on our Quarantine Gym website page, creating a Quaranteam Skills & Drills video project over on our YouTube Channel, planning our new summer socially-distanced programs,  Sports In Our Community Programs, learning about the latest health guidelines and planning for the future as things open up, restrictions are lifted, and health concerns still on are the forefront of our minds.

We know that GPS plays an important role in the development of girls’ health, well being, confidence, leadership and development as people. In the face of extreme challenges like COVID, racial injustice, and economic depression, it is critical that the community—caring, committed adults and also peer groups—support our youth in staying healthy. As an award-winning youth-based sports development program, GPS provides that kind of critical support, along with scholarships for at least 50% of our participants.  Through our Sports In The Community Programs we are continuing to bring high quality, health-appropriate programs into the community through several innovative approaches that meet children where they are, give them opportunities to interact safely, and lift their spirits along with their skill sets! We need your support.

Together, we will overcome adversity. As you may know, this spring, due to COVID, we had to cancel our first annual Pep Rally fundraiser, all of our programs, and our summer camp. This meant that hundreds of girls who typically participated in GPS activities, learned new skills, discovered strengths within themselves, were not able to engage with our fabulous high school role model coaches and our dedicated staff. Due to all those losses in revenue, we need your support now more than ever. Please make a donation today, any amount makes a difference. Help GPS get back in the game, stronger than ever.

We will get through this together!

-The Entire GPS Team

Donate Today!

Girls Play Sports is thrilled to announce that we have named Sarah Ghantous Stein to the position of Executive Director, effective July 15, 2020. Sarah brings an impressive track record of getting things done as a leader and an innovator. Most recently, she helped grow and transform Curt’s Cafe into multiple locations and raised almost $1 million as the Development Director. Prior to her career in non-profit work, Sarah was in pharmaceutical sales and launched products like Lunesta. She has extensive experience planning fundraising events, grant writing, working with budgets, and developing and implementing a strategic plan.

Sarah will be responsible for creating and implementing a strategic plan, oversight of fundraising and communications, as well as day-day operations.

For the past 10+ years, Sarah has dedicated herself to leading non-profit volunteer organizations in Evanston to support our youth. She has served on the Girls Play Sports Board of Directors, President of the Evanston Township High School Boosters, started Girls on the Run chapter at Walker Elementary, co-chaired the annual fundraiser for Foundation 65, and has led multiple fundraisers on behalf of the Woman’s Club of Evanston. Sarah’s superior skills in global thinking, planning, organization and passion have led to many great successes for the non-profits she has worked with.

Sarah is taking the helm from our original Executive Director, Megan Livatino who brought our co-founders’, Chris Livatino and Liz Brieva, vision to life. Sarah is looking forward to working with the experienced staff at Girls Play Sports to grow the organization and expand programming to other communities with a focus on reaching underserved youth. Sarah did not play team sports growing up as there were not many opportunities for girls to get involved at a young age. She passionately believes that it is something that all girls should get to experience during their youth.

Sarah’s daughter Emma dabbled in many different sports during her youth, was a Girls Play Sports leader and is a NCAA DI water polo player at Villanova. Sarah has a B.S. from Boston University and a certificate in Grant Writing from DePaul University.

Welcome Sarah!