About Finger Lakes Youth Sports

Finger Lakes Youth Sports (FLYS) is a 501c3 corporation that was started in 1993 to provide year round sporting activities for children and young adults with disabilities. We saw that there was, and still is a tremendous need and interest to provide a format that would accommodate children with disabilities in organized athletic activities that previously did not exist.

Our first sport was baseball. We run the Challenger baseball league and are affiliated with Little League Baseball in Williamsport. We were successful in our attempt to build a baseball field designed specifically for children with disabilities.  We were able to accomplish this with the generous help of families and businesses in the four county areas (Ontario, Seneca, Yates, Wayne) we serve. Our friends in Williamsport told us we were the first organization that they knew of to do this. 

The second sport we were able to provide was basketball. We started this program seventeen years ago. We talked about it for several years, but always had the same obstacles. Where do we play and how can we afford insurance? We approached  the Geneva YMCA and with the support of his Board of Directors agreed to host the program. We wrote a grant to the United Way, asking them to fund the program, and they accepted our request. For the last 4 years we have played at the Geneva North St school.

Our third sport was a bowling program. We started this sixteen years ago. We met with Pat Malcuria at Sunset Bowl and he was very gracious in helping us find a time slot to fit our needs and gave us a discounted rate we really needed to run this unfunded program.

The FLYS Board has always felt that we wanted to provide all of our programs to families of children with disabilities with no participation fee. So far we have been able to do this. There are many families that could not participate if there was a fee.

We added our fourth sport, soccer, in the fall of 2007 that allowed us to attain our goal of providing year round sports for children and adults with disabilities.

We are asking for your support to be able to continue to provide our programs to families without a fee. Your donation would be used to cover the costs of our unfunded programs for the Finger Lakes area. We hope that you look favorably on what our organization is able to provide.

Thank you for your support!
Finger Lakes Youth Sports, Inc.