Started by The Pack Lopez
Oct 26, 2025
Oct 26, 2025
2
The Pack supports Lopez Rec
Oct 26, 2025
The Pack board would like to encourage everyone to vote in this year’s local elections, and to seriously consider voting “yes” on the Parks and Recreation ballot measure.
We know you’ve heard opinions coming from every direction, but we wanted to give you a perspective of one boots-on-the-ground organization working hard to support just one part of what this measure will strengthen: youth sports.
The Pack includes six community members (Samantha Olson, Karrie Warner, Emily Berg, Jessie Patrick, Jamie Bair, and Jake Sausman) who are all parents, full time workers and/or business owners, coaches, and volunteers. When we revived the sports booster club in 2019, our main goal was simple: to rebuild a culture of athletics on Lopez Island and make sports more accessible to kids of all ages. Many of us had children who weren't old enough for varsity or middle school sports, but we wanted to start investing early and creating programs to expose them to athletics outside of PE or recess.
Athletics shaped us and the skills learned far outlasted our respective sports seasons. It taught us ways to manage our time with busy schedules, it sometimes gave us the motivation to work harder in class than we would have normally, it offered us a positive release or escape from difficult home environments, gave us mentors who pushed us beyond what we thought we were capable of, and it helped us learn how to work together towards a common goal with people who we might have never been friends with off the field/court/course. These soft skills translate into so many areas of adulthood and have for us as board members. We wanted to create the space to facilitate and recognize these same skills in our local and future athletes.
What we didn’t expect was to end up fundraising to cover a large chunk of the athletic budget. Our original plan was to fund the “extras”: posters to recognize athletes, new uniforms or warm ups so our athletes didn’t feel the discouragement we saw on their faces as coaches wearing 20-year-old uniforms or cotton t-shirts, senior gifts and banquets to celebrate their hard work and encourage the soft skills mentioned above (giving awards called "Lobo Heart" and "Most Valuable Teammate"), and summer camps to encourage off-season play. But over time, we have taken on major expenses that were once part of the school budget, like equipment maintenance, travel costs, floor refinishing, and now middle school sports.
Local businesses and families have stepped up again and again, donating thousands of dollars and attending almost-monthly fundraisers to keep these programs going. This is not sustainable for our small business community or for the volunteers keeping it afloat.
As fellow voters, we urge you to listen closely to those advocating for this measure. We are bipartisan voters working together and we are the people who have filled in the gaps thus far. We are the ones signing up when there’s a last-minute call for help and the ones managing budgets that keep shrinking. We have seen firsthand how external funding shortfalls affect our kids. Many of us are also tightening our budgets in our own homes during these unpredictable times, yet we all agree that when we work together our community can stretch every dollar further.
Having a centralized, dedicated Parks and Recreation department will bring long-term stability and sustainability to extracurricular programs (not just sports!). These programs are thriving on other islands with similar setups and they can here too.
We have seen this community support so much and we know it is a big ask for many of you, and we do not ask it lightly. But we have personally seen the lasting impact of extracurricular programs, after school care, and community programming, and all believe it is worth investing in for our current and future Lopezians.
Thank you so much for reading, and GO LOBOS!
The Lobo Pack
We know you’ve heard opinions coming from every direction, but we wanted to give you a perspective of one boots-on-the-ground organization working hard to support just one part of what this measure will strengthen: youth sports.
The Pack includes six community members (Samantha Olson, Karrie Warner, Emily Berg, Jessie Patrick, Jamie Bair, and Jake Sausman) who are all parents, full time workers and/or business owners, coaches, and volunteers. When we revived the sports booster club in 2019, our main goal was simple: to rebuild a culture of athletics on Lopez Island and make sports more accessible to kids of all ages. Many of us had children who weren't old enough for varsity or middle school sports, but we wanted to start investing early and creating programs to expose them to athletics outside of PE or recess.
Athletics shaped us and the skills learned far outlasted our respective sports seasons. It taught us ways to manage our time with busy schedules, it sometimes gave us the motivation to work harder in class than we would have normally, it offered us a positive release or escape from difficult home environments, gave us mentors who pushed us beyond what we thought we were capable of, and it helped us learn how to work together towards a common goal with people who we might have never been friends with off the field/court/course. These soft skills translate into so many areas of adulthood and have for us as board members. We wanted to create the space to facilitate and recognize these same skills in our local and future athletes.
What we didn’t expect was to end up fundraising to cover a large chunk of the athletic budget. Our original plan was to fund the “extras”: posters to recognize athletes, new uniforms or warm ups so our athletes didn’t feel the discouragement we saw on their faces as coaches wearing 20-year-old uniforms or cotton t-shirts, senior gifts and banquets to celebrate their hard work and encourage the soft skills mentioned above (giving awards called "Lobo Heart" and "Most Valuable Teammate"), and summer camps to encourage off-season play. But over time, we have taken on major expenses that were once part of the school budget, like equipment maintenance, travel costs, floor refinishing, and now middle school sports.
Local businesses and families have stepped up again and again, donating thousands of dollars and attending almost-monthly fundraisers to keep these programs going. This is not sustainable for our small business community or for the volunteers keeping it afloat.
As fellow voters, we urge you to listen closely to those advocating for this measure. We are bipartisan voters working together and we are the people who have filled in the gaps thus far. We are the ones signing up when there’s a last-minute call for help and the ones managing budgets that keep shrinking. We have seen firsthand how external funding shortfalls affect our kids. Many of us are also tightening our budgets in our own homes during these unpredictable times, yet we all agree that when we work together our community can stretch every dollar further.
Having a centralized, dedicated Parks and Recreation department will bring long-term stability and sustainability to extracurricular programs (not just sports!). These programs are thriving on other islands with similar setups and they can here too.
We have seen this community support so much and we know it is a big ask for many of you, and we do not ask it lightly. But we have personally seen the lasting impact of extracurricular programs, after school care, and community programming, and all believe it is worth investing in for our current and future Lopezians.
Thank you so much for reading, and GO LOBOS!
The Lobo Pack
