When Marie B. Ellis was alive, she devoted much of her time toward making Plant City a better place to live every day. Now her family is keeping Ellis’s goal alive in any way they can — which is how the “explosion” at Marie B. Ellis Park happened from 1 to 5 p.m. March 23.
The “Youth Explosion” event, a joint venture between the Exploring the Dream of our Youth group and Dream Team Basketball Inc., set out to celebrate both Ellis’s legacy and the youth of Plant City with an afternoon full of food, fun, games and giveaways. Kids could play basketball on the park’s court or on an inflatable one nearby, won prizes and got to hear testimonies from a handful of community leaders and mentors at the event. Rudyne Lee, Cordell Bostic, Reggie Ellis, Sarah Governor and Sharon Moody spoke to the kids about topics such as staying focused in school, being active, listening to parents and chasing their dreams.
“As far as me, my program is based on reaching youth through sports and entrepreneurship,” Bostic, head of Dream Team Basketball, said. “One thing I try to instill in them is there’s more than one way to go pro, whether you become a lawyer, doctor, agent — there’s more than one way to go pro in the game of basketball. I try to get all kids who come through me to look at life a little differently.”
The event also featured music from local artist Bishop Bullwinkle, best-known for his viral hit “Hell 2 Da Naw Naw.”
Lee, director of Exploring the Dream of our Youth, is Ellis’s granddaughter. She said she and her family wanted to celebrate the community and work with the youth just as Ellis did, but in a different way. Rather than go all-in on the city’s Easter celebration, which Ellis started in 1941 and brought to the park in 1945, they wanted to do something new and different that still held true to the spirit of Ellis’s work. That led to the creation of the Youth Explosion as a means to work with kids and help them get on the path to living a healthy, successful life.
“It takes a village to raise a child,” Lee said. “We are that village.”
Lee and Bostic want the Youth Explosion to be an annual event, something that gets bigger every year and makes all of Plant City want to stop by for the afternoon.
“We want to grow it as large as we possibly can,” Bostic said. “We want everybody in Plant City to show up next time. We want it to be something the entire community can get behind.”