Austin Comets Athletics is a sports fraternity that provides mentorship for youth to develop their skills, health and moral character for the welfare and well-being of the general public.

ACA is the flagship mentoring program of the parent organization The Metro Mentorship Initiative, a 501 (c)(3) not-for-profit public charity founded by Lorne F. Massie in 2010 and organized/incorporated by the Illinois Secretary of State of Cook County. Board members of The Metro Mentorship Initiative developed this program in the winter of 2011 of which is funded and supported directly from membership dues (program fees), donations and various fundraising campaigns. This program was officially launched in the spring of 2013.

The Problem ⟺

The industry of youth sports currently focuses on personal gain and entertainment. The idea of it being an avenue to teach boys life lessons has been lost. Many premier sports programs have a desire to win at all cost and reject unskilled or novice athletes because they don’t meet their extreme expectations. Parents and their children commit full-time to the obsession of securing 4-year athletic scholarships to universities in order to avoid paying high tuition fees.

Because most sports programs care more about the athletic talent of youth than their emotional intelligence, athletes do not learn how to deal with situations of failure and use poor tools to deal with conflict. Youth and children join sports teams and organizations to get away from the unsafe environment in their personal homes or neighborhoods. These same sports programs become contributors to the problem by not creating a safe place where youth and children can come to learn and connect with their peers and mentors.

The expectation to compete at a high level has no organization or supports the family structure and creates an atmosphere where youth and children don't have fun, experience burnout and develop long-term bad habits and injuries. The compulsion for sports perfection takes away from long-lasting relationships and being able to apply lesson learned through sports to life. While in school the most popular subject is physical education. Recreation or recess is only a component that is mandated by educational governing bodies and not used as a tool to allow kids to learn about diet and proper exercise and fitness. 

In sports youth and children have to be given the opportunity to lead in order to test the skills that they’ve learned.

Our goal is to re-shape the culture of youth sports. Young people are catered to and recruited at an early age to sign up to clubs sponsored by athletic apparel companies only to expose their parents and everyone in the community to their products. Because there is a huge desire for these kids to buys their product, most coaches who are given a stipend by these companies don’t care about the holistic development of youth and only want them to prosper in sports and nothing else.

Kids also are unfulfilled and usually feel entitled to get the best and not work for or earn rewards. We want to change the system by focusing more on using the avenue of sports to provide intervention to kids and not solely a way to make money or be famous. Youth will learn fundamentals of sports at a healthy moderate pace. Through a small family setting we will reject the ‘big business model’ of mass-producing young athletes and focus more on mentoring relationships as a great tool to heal social problems.

⟺Systemic Change

Global Perspective
⇕

​We’d like for our youth sports fraternity to become a nationally recognized brand for empowering youth and children in sports through mentoring relationships. Our vision is that our youth sports fraternity will host or participate in games or tournaments in other countries to expose our youth (members) to different cultures. We also hope to host international athletes and establish Austin Comets Athletics clubhouses around the world. We want the city of Chicago, Illinois to become an epicenter for elite athletes and be recognized around the world for no just their talent but also for their character and wellness. 

We’d like to imitate a healthy model of sports development from Latin American and Asian society where our members are taught sound athletic skills at a young level.

Impact on the Problem ⟺

We believe in healthy education and training of all youth and children especially the damaged, overlooked, forgotten, unproven and low profile athletes.  Austin Comets Athletics will challenge the youth sports culture by giving all youth an opportunity to achieve and learn the basic principles and fundamentals in sports. Youth and children (our proteges) will have the opportunity to become a member of our sports fraternity where they’ll find safety to establish trust in long-lasting relationships with their peers (other proteges’) and member coaches (mentors). 

Our member coaches, whom we define as mature men and women that take up the charge to be mentors, will be a community of support for the development of youth and children and teach skills that will holistically prepare them to be positive contributors to society. We wish to combat negative showmanship and do away with entertainment driven attitudes inspired by the pursuit of money. We hope to pioneer a new move in sports by bringing youth and children back to the love of the game in its truest form.