High school coach sets up nonprofit to help kids in need with extracurriculars

SALT LAKE CITY — One of the state’s high school basketball coaches has a plan to help kids who can’t afford sports and other extracurricular activities — a nonprofit he hopes will eventually go statewide.

Landen Cummings, varsity head basketball coach at East High School, has created the LEAP Foundation, which stands for Learn, Earn And Progress.

“It’s kind of like an introduction to a scholarship,” Cummings told KSL TV on Monday. “Ideally, what we want is for kids to earn good grades, and we’ll help pay for extracurricular activities, sports, computer programming classes, musical instrument classes and anything they do outside of school that costs money.”

Cummings described a process that involved parents submitting grades, kids writing a paragraph about why they like the extracurricular activities and the nonprofit would pick kids to help based on some of those factors.