Youngsters spend vital time at Orrville Area Boys & Girls Club

Once housed in a simple, old house on Main Street, the Orrville Area Boys & Girls Club now is bursting at its seams. Again.

Executive Director Josh Nolan said the 52-year-old club is constantly growing and looking for more space and more members. The latter has unlimited potential because Nolan said the club will never turn anyone away.

The club’s mission is to support, enable and develop youth and teens to reach their full potential. Support may be the most important of the three. Nolan said the club will not turn away a member for the inability to pay, be that membership fees or program service fees. Scholarships are available to all members who qualify.

For many in the community, the Boys & Girls Club represents a place to stay, play and be safe. For parents, it represents a lifesaver.

“It’s a huge lifesaver,” Nolan said. “For one, it allows parents to go to work or to school or whatever they’re doing. This would be a huge percentage of our population that would not have childcare. In these smaller towns like this, there’s not a lot of options.”

Make no mistake, though. This is not a daycare center. Though it plays that role in some cases, kids who attend — the club has more than 1,000 members and averages nearly 400 in attendance throughout the school year, with nearly half of those attending three or more days per week — are getting far more benefits than someone attending a professional daycare.

“The kids are getting some actual programming, some character building and some experiences they might not have access to,” Nolan said. “And we keep it as affordable as we can. We do everything with those who need us most in mind.

“We’re not a daycare center. We’re not there to just watch the kids. You look at kids from a variety of situations, and there’s always a need. There are kids from really wealthy homes. And guess what? The parents are gone all the time, so there’s a kid who will really benefit from the club. You’ll get to know everyone in the community here.”

The club employs four full-time staff and somewhere around 15 part-timers, depending on the time of year. The staff is headed by Nolan, who said the club prides itself on giving young people a chance to establish themselves as members of the work force.

He said the club is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, employers of high school kids and youth in the area.

“It’s fun watching those kids grow up,” Nolan said. “It’s a mixture of kids and backgrounds. It’s a job that’s not flipping burgers. You’re going to really be challenged here. You’re probably going to know in the first 15 minutes if this is for you or not. But it’s been fun seeing their growth as well. The other part of our job is we kind of raise our staff. For us it’s kind of a right of passage to work here.”

If you know someone who grew up in Orrville and lives there as an adult, you probably know someone who was a club member, then an employee and now maybe has a child of their own in the club. It’s a place where kids grow up and learn about life and life skills.

“For Orrville, especially, this is a thing where everybody has come here either before or after school, played sports here, or worked here,” Nolan said. “You would be hard-pressed to find someone under 50 that didn’t have some connection here. Most adult males you talk to here, how did they learn to mop a floor? Here.”

One of those people is Nolan himself. Self-described as neither popular nor athletic growing up and coming from what he called a fairly rough home with a lot of stuff going on, Noland found refuge in the Boys & Girls Club.

“We moved around a lot, and at one point in time, we lived out past Burton City Road and I would walk in,” he said. “I remember walking up the tracks to come in and be here. They called us club rats because those were the kids that just lived here, and that’s what I was. At bare bones that’s what we are. We’re a place where kids can come and have a good time and feel safe.”

Since Nolan’s early days, the club has expanded and now serves more than 150 club members in Rittman, a summer camp at Waynedale, and opportunities for club membership in Smithville and Dalton.

It’s no wonder the club is looking to expand, which would be the latest in a long line of growth since the club opened its doors in 1971.

“We’re running out of room,” Nolan said, noting the club’s current space is divided up by age groups including separate restrooms to keep the big kids and little kids apart. “We’re always looking to grow.”

Among things coming soon at the club is the annual Kids! Benefit Auction on April 13 at the Greystone Event Center in Wooster. Doors will open at 5 p.m. with a silent auction, followed by dinner at 7 p.m. with the live auction at 7:45 p.m. and casino games afterward.

“We’re gearing up for summer camp,” Nolan said. “We’re growth-minded, looking at new locations and new opportunities to serve more kids. We want to be in as many areas as we can serving kids. For Orrville, it’s made us special for sure. It’s a huge resource that not everybody has.”