When students go away to college, they usually have one thing in mind: to make sure they have a great time away from home. Although parties and hanging with friends sounds fun, a group on campus has found another way to have fun while being productive. That group is OASIS Ultimate, which focuses on playing frisbee with local high school students.
OASIS Ultimate is a volunteer group on campus with one goal in mind: to preoccupy at-risk youth during “danger hours,” which is the time when students are done with school but their parents are still at work. Many students choose to hang out in the street until a parent comes home, but this program gives them something else to look forward to.
For the last four years, Jacob Pine, the president of the club and a senior majoring in mathematics, has been a dedicated member of OASIS Ultimate. He spends one day a week with high school students at the Boys and Girls Club of Endicott, New York.
For Pine, it’s worthwhile to see how students respond.
“The way [the kids] reacted to us helping them out, all that positive energy, was just great,” Pine said about the first time he volunteered at the program.
Pine refers to his club’s visits as “frisbee clinics,” which are attended by high school students from Endicott every Monday from 3 to 6 p.m. He credits Holly Welfel, a SUNY Broome graduate, as the person who keeps the club going.
“She’s held this program for years, and this program of hers keeps the kids active, keeps them off the streets in a safe environment filled with dedicated volunteers,” Pine said. “Her program has a bunch of workshops. Cooking, tutoring, all stuff like that and we are one of those workshops.”
Pine is especially proud of the morals that his club teaches.
He gives an example with “clearing,” a common frisbee strategy where a player runs farther away from their team’s thrower in order to clear up space on the field. This increases the chances of another player ultimately catching their team’s frisbee.
“[With] ‘clearing’ we explain to them the importance of not giving up and just constantly retrying and that some things won’t happen for you the first time,” Pine said. “So what we do is connect [frisbee] to ways we can progress them into young adults.”
And as these students dedicate their time, they are constantly looking towards the future.
“We are trying very hard right now to expand,” Pine said. “We want to improve [the program] to two days a week.”
Because their club is not SA-chartered, it’s hard to come up with fundraising ideas. OASIS Ultimate is not allowed to table, which puts limits on the organization for ways to come up with money.
Their funds currently go to reimburse drivers and to buy shirts and frisbee discs for the students at the Boys and Girls Club.
“On average, we take one car over per week and we’ll have anywhere from one volunteer to five,” Pine said.
Although their Listserv boasts over 40 members, Pine says that it’s hard to find a volunteer time that works around everyone’s schedule, which is why volunteering twice a week would be more important.
In the future, Pine hopes to see his club collaborate with Decker School of Nursing. He wants to teach the students at the Boys and Girls Club about proper nutrition.
OASIS Ultimate aims to help as many students as they can. Although they are now only able to serve Endicott’s at-risk youth, their ultimate goal is to expand wherever they can. Despite this limiting distance, these students still manage to make a world of difference.