Kiwanis Little Olympics

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just the voice passing it along. Now, most stories worth telling started with somebody deciding to do something that didn't have to be done. This one started on April 21, 1942, right there in San Angelo, when the Kiwanis Club looked around and noticed something was missing.

Grade school kids in the area had no track and field competition to call their own. No venue. No stage to find out how fast their legs could carry them.

So the Kiwanis Club did what good neighbors do. They built one from scratch and called it the Little Olympics. That first one, on that April day in 1942, was a community service project, plain and simple.

But here's where the story gets interesting. It didn't stop. The annual event grew to host fourth through sixth grade students, drawing from thirty to thirty-five local schools.

Think about that for a moment. Thirty to thirty-five schools. Upwards of two hundred and fifty volunteer hours just to organize and run the thing.

And when race day comes, you're looking at an average of fifteen hundred participants, with five thousand spectators showing up to cheer them on. Five thousand people watching kids run. Now that is a community showing up.

Then came 2016. That year's Little Olympics was the seventy-fifth. The seventy-fifth.

What started as one club's answer to a gap in a child's world had become something that stretches across generations of San Angelo kids who got to find out what they were made of on a track. The marker says it well enough: volunteerism and community service can make a positive, lasting impact. And the Little Olympics proves it, year after year after year.

What the marker says

On April 21, 1942, the first Little Olympics began as a community service project organized by the San Angelo Kiwanis Club. The event let grade school-aged children prepare for and compete in an area track and field competition, otherwise not available to them. The annual event hosts 4th through 6th grade students from 30-35 local schools. Upwards of 250 volunteer hours are needed to organize and run the event, which averages 1,500 participants and 5,000 spectators. 2016 marked the 75th Little Olympics, illustrating how volunteerism and community service can make a positive, lasting impact on children of the San Angelo community. (2017)