What is "Elevate Basketball and Cheerleading?"

If you have a child in school hopefully you received a flyer for Elevate Basketball and Cheerleading.  Perhaps you have seen posters for it hanging in some of our local businesses.  If you listen to Gamecock Basketball on the radio, you may have heard Terry Dozier mention it during his postgame analysis.  

Elevate is a brand new and unique basketball league that has been birthed at Columbia First Nazarene at 901 St. Andrews Road (next to the Kroger with the Chick-fil-a).  

For the past four years I have been running children's basketball and cheerleading leagues at the church through a program called Upward.  Thousands of churches across the country run these leagues.  While this has been a great thing for us, it was at a lunch meeting last year when myself, our youth pastor, and former Gamecock and professional player, Terry Dozier, that we began to envision something even bigger.  

Terry was already running some higher level personal coaching and training through his ACE Basketball program as well as coaching AAU.  We were already running leagues for children.  It wasn't hard to connect the dots.  We envisioned a program that could literally meet your basketball needs "from the cradle until college."  We kicked it off in October with a free one day clinic and are now registering players for our leagues.  We are excited about the potential of where this program can go.

Registration for basketball players (ages 4-18) and cheerleaders (ages 4-11) is now open and practices will begin in less than a month.  If you or anyone you know is interested in registering, do it now because time is running out!  Online registration is available at www.columbianaz.com.