One Burbank athlete is igniting a spark for sports in young girls.
ELLA Sports Foundation held a free softball clinic for girls 7-12 and their parents June 14 at Robert E. Gross Park in Burbank where the participants were mentored by the organization’s founder Lilly Travieso.
The Burbank-based nonprofit aims to empower young women to become leaders of tomorrow through sports and academic excellence.
ELLA, which stands for Empowering Leadership in Latina Athletes, also helps provide female student-athletes and their families opportunities and resources to support them so they can succeed in life and “make their own legacy,” according to the foundation’s website.
“We are extremely proud to offer young girls the opportunity to get involved in sports and to reap its many benefits,” said Travieso. “Sports has been a blessing that has helped me achieve many of my dreams and I want to help young girls who may be dreaming of playing sports, just like I did when I started playing softball at 6 years old.”
Travieso founded ELLA in 2020 with the help of her mother Patty Godoy-Travieso to make a difference and share with other girl athletes and their parents everything her family learned about navigating girl sports and college recruitment.
Lilly Travieso recently graduated from Cornell University where she achieved All-Ivy Honors playing NCAA Division I softball. ELLA athletics director Manny Travieso and Kaelyn Freed, a sophomore at Sacred Heart University, helped out mentoring young aspiring athletes at the June 14 clinic.
The clinic, which was powered by Nike, also included a seminar for parents by led by Godoy-Travieso, who serves as the foundation’s CEO. She outlined the many benefits of playing sports for girls, which included discipline, team building, health benefits, athletic skills and other assets that will help them “build a legacy of excellence in sports and academics,” she wrote in a statement to the Leader.
Since its founding in 2020, ELLA has reached more than 7,000 female student-athletes and provided more than $12,000 in academic scholarships.
To learn more about ELLA’s work, visit ellasportsfoundation.org.
First published in the June 22 print issue of the Burbank Leader.
