Oakland's Free Sports Gear Library Opens in East Oakland

When families kept showing up at an East Oakland recreation center asking to borrow sports equipment, staffer Maribel Lopez saw an opportunity.

After 18 years working for Oakland's parks and recreation department, Lopez knew the numbers. Youth sports now cost American families an average of $1,016 per year per child, up 46 percent since 2019. In Oakland, only 14 percent of kids get the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity.

So when Lopez had budget left at the end of the year, she launched something beautifully simple. The Park Play Lending Library opened July 11 at the Larry E. Reid Sports Center in Brookfield Village, just south of the Coliseum.

The concept works exactly like it sounds. Check out a soccer ball or jump rope, take it to the park, and bring it back. Footballs, volleyballs, yoga mats, tennis equipment, and even board games now rotate through the collection.

"The library is just at the beginning stages right now," said Riles Nganga, a recreation leader at the center who grew up in the neighborhood. "Anything that can get people outside, outdoors, moving and not being in the house sedentary."

Brookfield Village has fewer parks and less green space than most Oakland neighborhoods, but plenty of kids. The sports center itself filled a similar gap when it opened in 2011 with the neighborhood's first public pool since 1976.

For three decades before that, 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.

Maria Garcia works the front desk and sees the same challenge with 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," she said. "Having resources like this kind of opens up that door for them."

The Ripple Effect

Lopez adapted the idea from tool-lending libraries that have run in Oakland and Berkeley for years. You borrow a drill the same way you'd borrow a book, use it, and bring it back. A soccer ball follows the same logic.

But her vision extends beyond physical activity. "We're aware that sports can lead to social mobility," Lopez told SFGATE. "When kids are familiar with golf, tennis, soccer, and other games that are more socially mobile, then they have access to different communities, different friend groups, different neighborhoods."

Nganga didn't need 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."

This is a pilot program. If it works here, Oakland plans to open one lending library per district, each stocked based on what that community requests. Partnerships with local sports organizations are already in development.

A lending library in East Oakland won't solve youth sports' affordability crisis, but it's already putting balls in the hands of kids who didn't have them yesterday.