How Sports Build Community Power & Connection

Guest Post – Jason Lacsamana, Director, Programs and Partnerships

In organizing work, we often talk about struggle, strategy, power, and justice. All those matter, but our team and partners have been talking a lot lately about another essential ingredient. Joy.

Joy is not separate from organizing. Joy is part of how we sustain it.

One place I see this so clearly is in all levels of sports – from my kids’ youth sports, community rec leagues, college ball, and the pros.

At their best, sports give us rituals, shared language, neighborhood pride, intergenerational memory, and a reason to get together. They create spaces where strangers become family, where young people see possibility, and where communities practice belonging.

When a team leaves a city or a college sport is defunded, we see clearly the role they filled in the space that now remains.

When the Raiders left Oakland for Las Vegas, it was not just a franchise relocation. It was another loss for a city whose fans had built a deep culture around loyalty, resilience, and identity. The Oakland A’s played their final game at home in 2024, and more than 45,000 fans showed up to watch baseball — and to mourn, celebrate, and insist that Oakland mattered. St. Louis felt the Rams’ departure to Los Angeles. Cal Poly dropped swimming and diving, and several colleges across the United States defunded tennis, leaving hundreds of students with the difficult choice of finding another school to compete in or staying where they’ve called home for the past year plus. My favorite sport, soccer, is a little more immune to these types of departures because its ties run so deep in its communities. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

These losses remind us that teams aren’t just businesses. They are woven into civic life, family stories, local economies, and community pride.

And still, communities organize.

Fans gather, young people play, families pass down traditions. Neighborhoods create new teams, new leagues, new rituals, and new ways to belong. In Oakland, even after the A’s decided to leave, fans helped spark new expressions of baseball identity and local pride. That, too, is organizing. Seattle organized so fiercely that there’s a very strong possibility that their beloved SuperSonics might return.

Sports can teach us something important about community power. People need places to come together, not only around what they oppose, but around what they love.

Joy builds trust, and trust builds relationships. Relationships build power.

As organizers, funders, nonprofit leaders, and community partners, we must make room for that joy. The block party, the youth basketball league, the community walk, the watch party, the celebration, the cheering section. I don’t consider these “extra.”

They are the infrastructure for connection, and they remind us why we do the work. Organizing is hard, and the inequities we face are real. But our communities are not defined only by pain or need. We are also defined by laughter, movement, food, music, sport, memory, and collective celebration.

Finding joy in organizing does not mean ignoring injustice. It means refusing to let injustice have the final word. Because when people gather around something they love, they remember what they can build together.