SignalsAZ.com Prescott News Podcast - What's Going on at The Boys and Girls Club in Prescott Valley?

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

Send us a text and chime in!In this episode, Guy Roginson interviews Alex and Savannah from the Boys and Girls Club of Central Arizona to talk about the exciting initiatives they have lined up to support youth in the community through adventure, creativity, and a whole lot of fun.From innovative fundraising to impactful after-school programs, the Club brings fresh energy to Prescott and the surrounding areas.Check out the CAST11.com Website at: https://CAST11.com Follow the CAST11 Podcast Network on Facebook at: https://Facebook.com/CAST11AZFollow Cast11 Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/cast11_podcast_network

Thanks for coming in, guys. I've got Alex and Savannah from Boys and Girls Club with Central Arizona. How's it going? Good. Doing great. We are here to talk about because I'm excited. I did the event last year, happy and excited to do it this year at Gunsite, Saturday, May 10th. You have a pistol competition.

We are calling it the On Target series, correct? Yes. Pistol 25. Talk to me all about it. And I just want to stay up front, this is a lot. fun event. This is for adults to come out and raise money for the kids in the club. You don't have to be a competitive shooter. Talk to us about it. Well, last year I hired Savannah on as our development director. And she is an events specialist. And one of our favorite things to do with our events,

I mean, after the model of Dancing for the Stars is we want to just have the most fun events and try different eclectic approaches to how we can raise money in the community. And so back in my Boy Scout days, I was exposed to different shooting sports tournaments that were fundraisers for kids. And so that's where the idea came with. And then after Savannah came on board, we were able to spearhead it. And last year, we successfully had the shotgun shoot over at Prescott, Trapp and Ski. And we're just rolling down that hill.

And so the next discipline is pistol. And we're at Gunside Academy on May 10th in Pauldin. And we're going to have a blast. Pun intended. I'm stoked because I probably have the shortest drive. I'm not in Northwest Chino Valley and Gunside's not far away. So really, really excited my wife. I had to come out.

And she doesn't shoot a lot. Yeah. But she's excited to get the opportunity to learn something. And those folks out there at Gunside are pros. Yes. Yeah. So it's super safe. I would encourage anybody that's always wanted to do something like this,

give it a shot. This is exactly for them. And, of course, if you're competitive, or if you want to go to, you know, there's going to be an auction. Yes. There was one last year. I cleaned up a little bit. Yeah, you did.

That's a great event. It is. For people who aren't familiar with the Boys and Girls Club, why don't you give the 30-second pitch on what your mission is? Sure. Well, the Boys and Girls Clubs here in Central Arizona, we have a very strong focus on taking kids outside, making sure that we take our after-school program model and provide as much outdoor experience is possible. So we like to say that we're not daycare. We're day camp every day

after school. And we're trying to lead that charge with the fundraising events a little bit matching that with some outdoor sportsman type events. But traditionally we're an after school program. We're open every day after school. When school is closed, we're open. We have summer day camp coming up, our all day program. So we'll serve the kids 10 hours a day for all eight weeks of summer. And really, we're just trying to be the most fun thing to do after school. both in the after-school day and after the school semesters are over. That's what we're up to, trying to make the place fun. I love that.

We're not daycare or day camp. Yeah. Because that was my favorite memories growing up, was either go to day camp or some type of camp, whether it was for a day or for a whole week or 10 days. Yeah. It's the longer, the better to get away from the family. Yeah. So once you break down the day for us, what is May 10th for the on-target?

an event for fundraising look like. Well, I'll let Savannah talk about that. It's just her event. So they'll come check in about 7 o'clock. We'll do a safety briefing and shooting will start at 8. We'll go through six different stages and we'll have lunch afterwards. We'll also have a simulator on site that will be there. For those that aren't shooting or they're done shooting, they can go practice more shooting.

And then we'll have our raffles and everything and then we'll end out the day. Awesome. Yeah, pretty easy. So you're looking at, it looks like here, 7 a.m. to 12 noon and 12 noon you have the lunch and the raffle. Yes. So it'll probably go until maybe one or two, but we'll start lunch and raffle at noon. And we have about 60 attendees right now, did you say? We're looking to get 100. Is that correct? Yes, sir. So we got plenty of room, but we already have a lot of people. Yeah. What else is going on at the Boys and Girls Club that we can share? You've probably got some more events coming out.

Yeah, we do. I mean, this weekend, we're revealing our season nine cast of Dancing for the Stars. Nice. We've done this for nine years or eight years now, and we're excited with a whole brand new cast of folks. The reveal party, like I said, is this Friday at Founding Fathers. So no spoiler or it's, huh? Darn it. Well, and the reveal party has become more traditional. A lot of our cast members have already told their friends and family and potential sponsors.

So we've sort of lightened up the secrecy around the reveal party. just more hone that tradition as the beginning of the campaign. Okay. All right. So how many competitors do we have this year? Can you say that? Yeah, we have 10 teams. And the coolest thing about the theme this year is half of our teams are celebrity couples.

So we're having a few of our celebrities dance with their spouse this year. Okay. To see if we can add a little bit, a new element of change to how the dances are developed and how the choreo goes. So, yeah, we're just excited to put it on again. Drama behind the scenes? No, no drama this year. No, no, we're now a dynamic duo.

I have Savannah as my backup and we're able to really serve the cast much better and avoid things like drama or I didn't hear about that thing. Drama's great. Yeah, I mean, it is a theater production and drama is everybody's profession there. So there may be some instilled there. All right. Who knows? And it's just taking place at the same venue?

Yeah, yeah. Dancing for the Stars will be at the Jim and Linda Lee Performing Arts Center. Okay. Yavipai College. We're so happy to have Yavapai as a partner again. They're doing a lot of there. They're doing a lot of there. Yeah, we were just at the Yavapalooza last week and we had a great time. I think Vicki Lawrence is coming Friday this week. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. So that they're just doing all kinds of great performances over there. Yeah, we love Yavapai College and the pack is great. And they're just always so helpful to us with

the tech needs. So where can folks go if they want to, let's start, let's digress. wrestle about where can they go to register for the on target or who can they call or what's the best route to go for that well they can always bug us at the clubs you know they can call us 928 7776 866 and they can get a hold of savanna or our director of support michel and and buy their tickets they can also just go to clubs on target dot org and and everything there for the tournament is there you can uh put your name in on a squad you can also check out what's on for raffle uh that day and uh yeah It's nice and simple to register. You can also sponsor still.

We're collecting sponsors if they want. And then for Dancing for the Stars, where can folks go to find out more info? The tried and true website, Dancing for the Stars.net. It's still our same website. And it's built right now. And the voting center and the tickets are not live until this Friday. But you can start following us this weekend and buy your tickets. Okay.

Pick your dancer and everything. Awesome. And now, so we've got the on-target chairs, we've got dancing for the stars. What else is going on with Boys and Girls Club? Well, we have summer day camp coming up. And that is our big deal because we like to say we're not daycare. We are launching our full program days starting in June. Well, we're going to watch the kids May 28th and 29th as after school lets out.

And then June is really when the summer day camp kicks off. And we've got all sorts of things lined up, not just for our school age kids, but we're really taken in advantage of the high number of teenagers that we have at the clubs right now. So we're going to have teen programs all through the summer. They're going to have their own backpacking day. They're going to have their own lake day on top of the other three lake days that we provide for all the other kids. Archery all summer. Mountain biking.

Mountain biking's back for its fifth year. We're really excited for that. I bet Judd Simmons is involved with that one. Judd Simmons, our board member, yes. The guy that started it all with me five years ago. he and I have worked really hard and we've got some new equipment for the kids and we're very well stacked and he gets really cool volunteers to help coach mountain biking another another big name mr Greg raskin will come out yeah great he'll ride bikes with us too but the program grew so well

over these past years i was able to hire a mountain biking coach and so coach james is a young man who is our now part-time employee that's taken care of the equipment the trail rides and trying to get it off summer and make it year-round. That's awesome. And so we're just going to keep pushing that forward. So day camp, dancing for the stars, on-target series. I'm going to keep saying so we have different reels to get chopped up. What else?

You guys got so much going on. Is there anything else? There's got to be. I mean, I can't really think of anything else. That's a lot right now. What I can say is that the on-target series, we're calling it a series because we're trying to launch a new shooting sports discipline. every year to half year if we can get the logistics down.

And so if Pistol is a success, then we're going for long gun. Then we're going to do a rifle shoot. And we know that there's a lot of bow hunters here. So archery would be next on the docket. I think Nick Fisher from Arizona Archery. Enterprise is your guy there. He's great. That's a big company.

They're a big proponent of that sport, obviously. Yeah. We just know that there's already a lot of golf tournaments in town. There are. And we wanted to pick a different sport that you can raise money behind and that a bunch of folks can come out and have a great time. Yeah, and you don't have to be a professional or a competitive shooter to do it. You can just be, I like to go out shooting. I want to give it a try because I like shooting.

I've never been in a shooting competition. We had fun at the overrunner on the ski, the trap shooting. I love shooting my shotgun, but am I good at shooting trap or skeet? Definitely not. But it was still fun to give it a shot. I saw a lot of guys who looked like they knew what they're doing. Yes. They were, it was like me new.

It was all new. So I like to emphasize that is it's not for the competitive shooter. It's for everybody, including the competitive shooter. Do you want to try it? Just come out and give it a try. I like the idea of it being frequent because I don't get out to shoot at the range as much as I want. Right. And usually what I'm doing it, I'm by myself.

Yeah. And sometimes I take my wife out. So it'd be nice to, you know, commiserate with people in the community and a lot of your friends that don't have the opportunity, but they finally get to socialize. Yeah. As well as learn some stuff because you're not going to learn from anybody better than say either at gunside or Prescott trap or if you have a long gun and you involve some of our veterans and so forth, you really want to learn something. It's a great place to learn. It's a great place to learn. It's a great place. to socialize and just have some fun. And raise money for the kids. And raise money for the kids. So that's what I really want to emphasize is come on out to the On Target series May 10th, find out more about what's coming up.

But then you talk about opportunities and maybe volunteering for people who are either a new to the community or simply want to get involved in something. Who can they call it or where should they reach out to at the Boys and Girls Club if they want to volunteer an help. Well, the volunteer and the job, well, the job application is on our Indeed profile and everything is on our website, BGCCCAZ.org. If you want to get involved, both at the staff level and at the volunteer level, we're always looking for volunteers to come and help out. We're working on some volunteer projects to help dress up our facilities a little bit more. Our Prescott Valley Club is really beautiful inside, but we need some landscaping work. So we're always looking for volunteer projects and volunteer opportunities for folks to come and help us out.

You got weeds out there? Yeah. And a lot of gravel. I need to bring some goats. I got goats to volunteer. Yeah. There's, I can be the supervising partner.

Yes. We, there's a, there's a special piece of history on our lot. We actually have one of Bill and Nancy's oldest trees in our front lot. It's beautiful. Yeah. And we want to really take care of it because it's actually the only piece of foliage

around the building. And so we kind of want to add. had some landscaping around it because the inside of the building is a multi-million dollar capital campaign in there and it's just beautiful and we want the outside to match the inside now awesome yeah so again the on target pistol 25 tournament lunch and raffles Saturday May 10th 7 3m. 7 a.m. check in it's a 730 yeah call time probably 7.45 8 o'clock we get people rolling out of bed uh whether you're not novice or a competitor come out and join us. We're hoping to get to about 100 people. We're at 60 right now. So we got a lot of people, but we got a lot of route. We're raising money for the kids and

the clubs. It's an adult event. What's the age range for? We do have a junior bracket. So 15 to 17 can be in the junior bracket. And then we have a seniors bracket 65 plus. So 15 to 95, basically. So all I got to do is do a Google search for Boys and Girls Club or on Target and it comes right up. That's right. Either you get Boys and Girls Club or you need to get Signalsazee.com. You guys are doing awesome things in the community. I'm looking forward to May 10th. And you guys should just come in once a month and tell us what's going on.

We should. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. Thanks, Guy.