Meet the 2024 SportsKid of the Year: Arden Pala

At the playground outside Perkins Elementary in San Diego there’s a mural featuring an oversized kid sitting on a small planet Earth, staring off into space. On the mural are the words sueña grande, and right above that is the English translation: dream big.

Not far from that mural, on a winter Monday afternoon, cones have been set up around a basketball court and balls have been distributed to a group of 12 or so kids. At the end of the court, a man named Coach Juan is putting some of the kids through drills. At the other end, the person running the clinic looks barely older than the elementary school students.

In fact, one is taller than he is.

The coach’s name is Arden Pala. He’s a sophomore at Francis Parker High. He made the clinic possible. And for that, he’s our 2024 SportsKid of the Year.

The first time Arden visited Perkins was about four years ago. He was volunteering to read to the students at the school, and on the way out, he was chatting with the principal, Fernando Hernandez.

As they were talking, Hernandez told Arden that the school recently had to let go of its athletics coach to save money. It was a blow to the school and to the students who desperately needed such programs. Many Perkins students live in shelters, in cars, or even in tents near the school. Hernandez estimates that at that time more than a third of the students were affected by homelessness. And most of those who weren’t came from impoverished backgrounds. “In this community, we do not have a YMCA,” says Hernandez. “We do not have a Little League. If parents wish to take their kids to play these things, they have to travel out of this community. And most of our families do not have a car. They’re not mobile.”

When Hernandez explained the situation to Arden, the 11-year-old was stunned. He loved playing basketball. He was on a club team, and while he knew he was never going to grow up and become the next Steph Curry, he found joy in playing with his friends.

So Arden talked to his parents, Serhat and Zeynep, about how he could help. They got in touch with Hernandez, and Arden offered to come to the school and teach the kids how to play basketball every Wednesday afternoon.

Coaching kids who were roughly his age was not easy. “My first year, I wouldn’t call it a train wreck, because it went well and the kids enjoyed it, but it was hard for me,” Arden says. “There were times where I was thinking, Man, should I just stop doing this, because I didn’t know if the kids are getting anything out of it.”

So Arden did what a lot of kids his age do: He spent time on YouTube. Specifically, tutorials on how to teach kids the game. He also drew on his experience as an actor. (We should note that Arden is also an author who has published three books about a flying car, and he’s also a documentary filmmaker.) “I had a really loud voice, and I was used to shouting and stuff like that, so that helped me a lot,” Arden says. “And I got a whistle as well. Whistles are important.”

Eventually, he began to see results. Basketball was giving the kids some badly needed structure. “It teaches the kids more life lessons, like working as a team, being hardworking, and the need for sportsmanship,” Arden says.

At the same time, Arden realized that there were more schools like Perkins that lacked sports programs, but he knew if he really wanted to broaden the program, he was going to need more resources. So at the beginning of 2020 he started Sports4Kids. The charity raises money to purchase equipment and pay instructors like Coach Juan. But it does more than just fund the clinics that have introduced 750 kids to team sports, including soccer and basketball. Sports4Kids has distributed more than 25,000 pounds of food and mobilized 350 youth volunteers.

Arden is the chief executive officer of Sports4Kids. It's not a ceremonial title. He’s the one who is going out and applying for grants and giving speeches to raise money—more than $300,000 to date.

And it’s not just money. It’s also getting people to volunteer their time. Arden has brought in a former NBA player and member of the Harlem Globetrotters to help with clinics. “He actually did rugby, too,” says Hernandez. “He brought out players from the local team. And we’re all like, ‘What’s rugby? How do you play it? What are the rules? San Diego has a rugby team?’ How he finds them, I don’t know.”

So how did Arden get this way? His parents came to the U.S. from Turkey 27 years ago with few possessions, but they’ve been able to make a good living through hard work. That hasn’t been lost on Arden and his older brother, Kenan. Arden’s parents insisted that he and his brother not forget about their family’s humble roots, that not everyone has the advantages they do.

Arden started volunteering when he was around 5, doing things like serving food at homeless shelters. He always made sure to talk to the people he met there. “Hearing their stories, I guess I kind of developed empathy,” he says. “You get a really good feeling when volunteering, and you feel like you’re making an impact, you’re having a contribution to society. I mean, I got addicted to that.”

As Arden is talking, he’s sitting in the cafeteria at Perkins. Scattered around the room are boxes of books he procured from Barnes & Noble for an upcoming holiday giveaway. When asked what he’d like to do in the immediate future, he says he wants to put on more clinics to use sports to teach kids about teamwork. He’d like to eventually become an entrepreneur—so long as his business can do good. He and some friends are already at it, developing an app that allows parents and struggling students to track and incentivize their work—essentially setting up rewards for reaching academic goals.

Coach Juan, for one, doesn’t doubt that Arden will achieve his goal. “I see him being the owner-CEO for some multi-billion dollar company,” says Juan. “You better stay close to him because if not, you’re going to get left behind.”

Running the charity means Arden doesn’t have time to play with his basketball club team any more, but he still goes to the gym twice a week to “play against grown-ups.” And he still finds time to get out to schools to do some hands-on work. On this day, he and Juan are running the show for some regulars who have been attending his clinics since they started. Arden gives out shooting tips and runs drills, and when he sees some kids goofing off, he makes them do a few jumping jacks.

But when he sees some behavior he really doesn’t like—saying mean things—he takes the kids aside and talks to them about it. “This can be taught through school and classes as well—they help these kids tremendously,” Arden says afterward. “But there’s a certain aspect of teamwork and sportsmanship that comes from sports and from athletics.”

Then it’s time to go. So he gets up and walks outside, past the mural that’s a reminder that sometimes dreaming big can lead to great things.