Most evenings that stretch of Hyer Park has the same rhythm: kids cutting across a front yard for a pickup game of soccer, the walk home from Hyer Elementary a few blocks long, somebody's older kid running down to Snider Plaza for a soft drink. It is not a scene anyone would flag as remarkable, which is exactly why it took a city announcement to make people notice whose front yard it was.
In July, the City of University Park named Clayton and Ellen Kershaw its 2026 Citizens of the Year, an honor the City Council established in 2005 to recognize residents whose service has made a lasting difference in the community. Clayton spent 18 seasons as a starting pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers and is one of only 20 pitchers in history to reach 3,000 strikeouts. He and Ellen also happen to be the couple who walked their kids to the same elementary schools they attended themselves, a few blocks from where they grew up.
The public celebration simply moved to a later date.
A Parade the Honorees Couldn't Reach
Citizen of the Year recipients are traditionally recognized at University Park's annual Fourth of July Parade, presented by the Rotary Club of Park Cities. The Kershaws could not attend this year's festivities because of prior commitments. For a couple this connected to the neighborhood's daily life, the schedule conflict is a small footnote, and the city planned a new date for the celebration.
City officials have since confirmed the new plan. The Kershaws will be officially celebrated at University Park's holiday tree lighting in November, an annual tradition staged in Snider Plaza rather than at a formal review stand. That detail matters more than it looks. The plaza is not a backdrop the family visits for civic occasions. It is where they already are.
Two Elementary Schools, One Block Radius
Clayton attended Bradfield Elementary. Ellen attended Hyer Elementary. They met in middle school through mutual friends and started dating during their freshman year of high school, then went on to Highland Park High School together, where Clayton also played football as the center for a future NFL quarterback before baseball became his path. According to the city's own announcement, the couple is now married for 15 years and raising five children in University Park, where they wanted their kids to grow up inside the same close-knit community that shaped their own childhoods.
That choice is worth sitting with. Clayton's career was based in Los Angeles for nearly two decades. Nothing required the family to keep a home in University Park during the baseball offseason rather than build a life entirely on the coast. They did it anyway, which is a different kind of commitment than showing up for a single ribbon-cutting.
Ellen's own civic footprint has grown alongside Clayton's baseball one. She recently completed a year as PTA president at Hyer Elementary, the same school she attended as a child, and the couple organized a donation drive to support families affected by the Los Angeles wildfires in 2025. None of this reads like a celebrity checking a box. It reads like two people who never fully left the neighborhood they were recognized for serving.
What the Nonprofit Actually Funds
The couple's largest and longest-running commitment predates the award by 15 years. In 2011, Clayton and Ellen traveled to Zambia and met a nine-year-old orphan named Hope, who was ill and living on the streets. They founded Kershaw's Challenge that same year, with Clayton pledging a donation for every strikeout he recorded on the mound. The organization built a home for Hope and a dozen other children, and has since expanded to support vulnerable children in Dallas, Los Angeles, Uganda, and the Dominican Republic. Clayton has said the nonprofit has raised roughly $25 million over its lifetime.
Part of that total traces directly back to this neighborhood. Many of the organization's earliest and most consistent donors are families from the Park Cities who backed the effort from its first years and are still giving. A charity that started as a strikeout pledge from a 23-year-old rookie became, over a decade and a half, something closer to a shared University Park project.
The Second Ceremony Is the More Accurate One
With the parade behind them, the city scheduled the celebration for a setting that suits the Kershaws well.
Snider Plaza is where the family has run its errands for years: burgers from Chip's, fajitas from Bandito's Tex-Mex Cantina, a Chippery run for something sweet on the way home. It is a five-minute walk from Hyer Elementary and from Highland Park Presbyterian Church, where the whole family fills a pew most Sundays. A ceremony held there is not a formal event bolted onto the family's routine. It is the routine, with a stage added to it for one night.
The tree lighting itself follows a familiar shape from year to year. Past events have included:
- Live holiday carols and dance performances on a main stage
- The lighting of the plaza's holiday tree as the evening's centerpiece
- Santa photos and family activities set up among the plaza's shops
- Plaza retailers and restaurants open through the evening
Vendor and sponsorship applications for this year's event close November 1, which means the shape of the night is already being locked into place. The exact date typically shifts year to year, so residents planning around it should confirm timing through the City of University Park's calendar closer to the date.
A Small Print Detail That Explains the Whole Story
None of this changes what University Park already knows about itself, but it does put a specific name and a specific year on something that is usually just assumed. The University Park neighborhood has a reputation for the kind of continuity where families stay for generations and civic life runs through a handful of shared spaces rather than through anonymous institutions. Most of the time that reputation rests on nothing more concrete than a feeling. This year it rests on a Hall of Fame level career, a nonprofit that has raised eight figures with the neighborhood's own families as backers, and a city choosing the plaza where the family already spends time as the place to say thank you.
Snider Plaza has had its own year of change, with new ownership, new tenants, and a governance shift that reshaped who signs the leases there, a story worth its own read for anyone tracking what's actually changed at street level. This November, the same plaza takes on a different kind of role, hosting the celebration of the Kershaws.
When the tree goes up in Snider Plaza this year, the family standing in front of it will be a few doors down from the counter where they've ordered dinner for years.
Wiebe Real Estate has spent years watching University Park's small-town instincts show up in moments like this one. If you're curious what else makes this neighborhood run the way it does, Work With Us.
