A glimpse of the future came to Yolanda Rodgers at age 12. A tall man walked into an old gym with a basketball and conducted a clinic for the Eastside Boys and Girls Club. The kids played ball and had a Q&A session with the 6-foot-2 gentleman who led the clinic.
“I didn’t know who the man was,” Rodgers said. “I didn’t know his title. I just know we had so much fun.”
Soon after, Rodgers began hooping in a Drug-Free League run by the San Antonio Spurs. The founder of the league was the man who had led the clinic, and to Rodgers’ surprise, he was an assistant Spurs coach, Gregg Popovich.
Thirty-three years later, Rodgers is director of Spurs Community Sports. Under her purview is the Spurs Youth Basketball League (SYBL), formerly the Drug-Free League, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary. “I’ve come full circle,” Rodgers said.
A safe haven
Popovich, the Spurs head coach for the past 28 seasons, founded SYBL with Kids Sports Network President Frank Martin in 1990. Nearly half a million athletes have participated. Notable alumni include former Mexican national team star Orlando Mendez-Valdez and former San Antonio Silver Stars guard Tai Dillard.
Rodgers, 46, is another. She grew up in Wheatley Heights on the East Side. To avoid the gangs and drugs in the area, Rodgers spent most of her free time at the gym or at Wheatley Heights First Baptist Church, where she ushered and sang in the choir. The Drug-Free League provided another safe haven in 1991.
“The neighborhood stuff was bad,” she said. “The league gave me a chance to be a kid and to be with kids that were not doing bad stuff. We had a coach who would take us to the Calderon Boys and Girls Club on the West Side and play against them. I tried to stay in that little safe space so I didn’t get caught in any issues or any trouble. I just tried to be different from what I was seeing.”
A dream blossomed in the Drug-Free League. Rodgers hoped to become the first female referee in the NBA. Since there was no professional league for women (the WNBA did not form until 1997), Rodgers wanted to make her mark among men.
She studied the sport and worked hard on her own game. Rodgers learned how to use the backboard to score in the Drug-Free League and carried that skill to Sam Houston High School. She played two years until a mysterious tightening in her chest led to a frightening diagnosis: pleurisy, an inflammation of tissue that separates the lungs from the chest wall. Doctors told her she could not play.
Rodgers kept hooping anyway — but not for long. A coach caught her playing pickup in the neighborhood. Her basketball career ended. So did a dream.
“I loved the game,” she said. “I wanted to play so bad. But I was a child in a bubble and I wasn’t thinking.” Giving up basketball, she acknowledged, may have saved her life.
Creating memories
After high school, Rodgers began a long career in banking. She had four children but did not steer them toward basketball. Her oldest, Bryonna Bosier, began attending San Antonio Silver Stars games and imagining a career in the WNBA. In 2011, Rodgers took Bryonna to a Spurs camp at St. Mary’s Hall. While signing her daughter up, she saw the Silver Stars were looking for a sales representative.
Rodgers remembers thinking: “You know what, I’m gonna work for the WNBA.” She got the job and saw Bryonna and two sons, Felton and Kalvin, play in the Spurs Youth Basketball League. For many years, Rodgers lived in gyms, nostalgia stirring, new memories forming. Could life get any better?
To her astonishment, it did. Kara Allen, chief impact, people and belonging officer for Spurs Sports & Entertainment, asked Rodgers to help with community sports, which entailed working with the Spurs Youth Basketball League.
“That’s the one thing that saved my life and gave me a safe place to be,” she said. “Now I can keep it going and make sure it stays alive.”
Bryonna, a 29-year-old barber, is taking her mother’s ideas from SYBL and incorporating them into her church in Dallas. “My pastor asked me to be part of a capital campaign. So I’m going to bring a 3-on-3 basketball tournament to raise money for the church. I watched my mom build up national tournaments and work with the Jr. NBA. I was able to see firsthand how that works, how to run it and how it helps the kids. I’m very proud of my mom.”
As director of community sports, Rodgers has one primary role: making sure kids have access to basketball. Sometimes that means inviting SYBL teams to play on the Frost Bank Center court. Sometimes it means giving SYBL players and parents tickets to Spurs games. “We’re here to create memories,” she said. Not infrequently, someone stirs memories for her.
“The one thing that gets me every time is seeing a parent who went through SYBL bringing their own kids through it,” she said. “Or they come to camp and show me pictures of when they were kids. It just reminds me it’s working.”
Nearly 10,000 kids participate in the SYBL. “Probably none of them are going to go to the NBA,” Rodgers said. “But if you put that joy in them for one clinic or one camp, that’s the memory that will stick. That’s the memory that stuck with me.”
The sound of bouncing balls echoes across decades. It starts in an Eastside gym and carries two miles down the road to the Frost Bank Center. Rodgers marvels. “I find it awesome and a blessing,” she says. “The beauty of it is how God directed my path and journey to say, ‘Okay, now you’re ready and here you are.’”
