On long road trips, Connecticut Sun point guard Jamie Carey gets a fair amount of reading done.
“I read 15 books last year,” she said. “That’s all I do on the road.
Carey, who just finished David Sheff’s addiction memoir Beautiful Boy, teamed up with teammate Ketia Swanier to promote literacy with an appearance last week at the Waterford Public Library.
Sponsored by Pitney Bowes, the WNBA’s Fast Break for Reading will raise money for literacy programs in six of the league’s cities, including New York, Seattle, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, as well as eastern Connecticut.
“We’re excited about the program,” Kathleen Ryan Mufson, the director of corporate citizenship at Pitney Bowes said. “The company has a long tradition of helping communities. We want to help improve literacy and close the achievement gap in Connecticut.”
Carey and Swanier each took turns reading books about, no surprise here, basketball, to kids who signed up for Waterford’s Summer Reading Program.
Swanier, a rookie who played her college basketball at the University of Connecticut, read A Princess Gets A Ball, about hoops-playing royalty, and Carey narrated Swish, about a hotly contested match between the Blue Jays and the Cardinals.
The Sun announced that a section at the team’s home arena will be dedicated specifically to children who have participated in the program.
Throughout the season, Pitney Bowes will be holding events around the state to raise money to sponsor literacy programs.
Pitney Bowes will fund a “reading and learning center” at the WNBA city that has raised the most amount of money this season, which concludes in September.
Swanier, who just finished The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, said she was pleased to talk to the children, as she used to attend similar events as a child growing up in Germany.
Carey, a University of Texas alum, also demonstrated the trademark “hook ‘em horns” sign for the kids, but said that athletics should not be the only thing young people focus on.
“I grew up in a house that stressed reading and education,” she said.