Ten Summers of Peace: Camden’s Tournament Grows Up

If you want to understand what a neighborhood is worth, spend a Saturday at Von Nieda Park.

By the courts at 29th and Pierce, in the city’s Cramer Hill section, this weekend looks like every reason a city holds onto itself: kids running skills drills in the July heat, families spread out with folding chairs, the thump of a basketball competing with live music and the smell of food that somebody’s aunt insists is better than anybody else’s. Bounce houses. Face painting. A soccer clinic tucked in beside the main event. And at the center of it all, a basketball tournament that started ten years ago as a grassroots idea and has quietly become one of the best things this city does all summer.

Today, Sunday, is championship day for the 10th Annual Camden Peace Games — and getting to a tenth anniversary is not something anyone at Von Nieda takes for granted.

A stubborn proposition, ten years running

The Peace Games launched in 2016 as a simple, stubborn proposition: give young people a reason to be together, in the open, around something joyful, and you take a little air out of everything that pulls a neighborhood apart. A decade later, the free, two-day, co-ed tournament has swelled into a full weekend of clinics, family programming, community-resource vendors, and, this year for the first time, soccer skills and drills added to broaden who gets to play. It runs rain or shine — and if the sky opens up, the whole thing shifts indoors to the Rutgers-Camden Athletic Gym on Linden Street without missing a beat.

Mayor Victor G. Carstarphen, a former Camden High basketball standout who knows these courts from the player’s side, called the tenth year “a remarkable milestone” for both the event and the city. He’s woven the Peace Games into a larger argument he’s been making all summer — that clean parks and open spaces, especially for kids, aren’t a luxury. They’re public safety.

For 10 years, this event has showcased the very best of Camden by bringing together young people, families, businesses, and community organizations around a shared commitment to peace and opportunity.Mayor Victor G. Carstarphen

The quiet coalition behind it

The games are organized under the Camden Community Partnership’s Connect the Lots program, and they run on the kind of quiet coalition that most people never see — Camden County commissioners, Philadelphia 76ers alumni, and P.A.R.K. CMD, which stands for Providing Alternate Resources for Kids, Camden. It’s a lot of moving parts to pull off a free weekend of basketball. That, the organizers will tell you, is precisely the point.

“For a decade, this event has created lasting memories while providing positive opportunities for young people and families,” said Dana L. Redd, president and CEO of the Camden Community Partnership. She called the ten-year run “a testament to what can be accomplished when government, nonprofit organizations, businesses, and community members work together toward a common goal.”

Camden County Commissioner Al Dyer put it in plainer terms — the language of somebody who’s watched the same kids come back year after year. “For 10 years, we’ve watched these games build friendships, strengthen neighborhoods, and remind our young people that this community believes in them,” Dyer said.

Lance Fussell, representing P.A.R.K. CMD, has seen the arithmetic up close. “Every year we see young people gain confidence, make new friendships, and discover the positive impact sports can have on their lives,” he said. “The Camden Peace Games continue to prove that when a community comes together around its youth, everyone wins.”

Not a program anymore — a tradition

There’s a temptation, writing about a thing like this, to reach for something grand. But the truth is smaller and better. A tenth summer means there are teenagers on those courts today who were in elementary school at the first one — kids who grew up measuring the season by this weekend. That’s not a program anymore. That’s a tradition. And traditions are how a neighborhood tells its young people, without ever saying it out loud, that they belong to something worth keeping.

Championship rounds, the War Room clinic for the six-to-eight-year-olds, and the awards presentation run today at Von Nieda Park. More information is at ctlcamden.com/peace-games.

Go if you can. Ten years is worth showing up for.

Based on reporting from The Sun Papers (Camden County).