On the court, the Curry game is all about timing: A dribble to freeze a defender, a quick assist to the open player, a 3-point shot launched just inside of midcourt to take the lead.

Right now, in a time of crisis and a world without basketball, the Curry timing is just as strong.

Nine months ago, Stephen Curry and his wife, Ayesha, launched their foundation, Eat. Learn. Play. Created to help underserved children in Oakland, one of the foundation’s key pillars is addressing hunger. Over the past year, the foundation ramped up its efforts, working with community partners to provide meals for the approximately 25% of Oakland school children who have food insecurity.

And then the coronavirus happened.

“The need has grown exponentially,” Stephen Curry said this week in an interview with The Chronicle. “We’ve seen what COVID has done to the community at large. There’s a steep learning curve, in getting set up to do this work, but we don’t have to work through that.

“Amidst the uncertainty and chaos, we are in position to make an impact.”

According to Eat. Learn. Play. CEO Chris Helfrich, the foundation has, for the moment, set aside the other two areas of emphasis — education and fitness — to focus on the critical need for food. Aligning with the Oakland Unified School District and the Alameda County Community Food Bank, the original goal of feeding the Oakland children has changed to feeding any Oakland resident in need.

The foundation has gone from feeding 4,000 families a week in February to 15,000 families to now providing 300,000 meals a week. Since the outset of the pandemic, the foundation has helped serve more than a million meals.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Ayesha Curry told The Chronicle. “For us to start in July and then just a few months later have this crisis thrust at our community and be able to keep up with the demand has really been a blessing.”

Making food a critical piece of their foundation was a natural fit for Ayesha Curry, who has established a multifaceted career in the culinary world. (Ayesha Curry was sued this week by a former associate with whom she cut ties 11 months ago. Her lawyer characterized the former partner, who is seeking more than $10 million for breach of contract, as “disgruntled.”)

Ayesha’s relationships in the food industry, including with Michael Mina, her partner in International Smoke restaurants, led to a connection with José Andrés, the founder of World Central Kitchen.

WCK is a nonprofit NGO that Andrés, a well-known chef based in Washington, D.C., founded after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. His mission is to provide meals after natural disasters. In early March, when the Grand Princess cruise ship docked in Oakland, WCK collaborated with food management company Bon Appetit to feed thousands of stranded passengers. That was when Eat. Learn. Play. reached out.

“They got in touch with us,” Andrés said. “This is what we do very well — we work with people in the community. We are dealing with a humanitarian crisis in real time. The Currys are very good people who have done a lot in their community. We’re helping them and they’re helping us.”

The collaboration includes a partnership with local restaurants that produce the meals available for pickup or delivery at 30 locations. That allows those businesses to continue to employ their workers, another benefit to the community.

“We are boots on the ground,” Andrés said. “You cannot feed people from an office. We are in the community.”

That was the Currys’ goal when they created Eat. Learn. Play. “We want to have a direct impact,” Ayesha said last summer, when the foundation was launched.

But they could not have imagined how that need for their impact would increase exponentially.

The crisis hit the Currys like it hit all of us — a tsunami of change and upheaval. At the last Eat. Learn. Play. board meeting at the end of February, Ayesha said the focus was on how the coronavirus might create a huge need for summer meals for their program. Within days, the wave of hunger began to hit.

Less than two weeks after that board meeting, the NBA season was canceled. “I left practice thinking we were going to have a game without fans the next day and then the league shut down,” Curry said. “Things changed so quickly.”

“That was a big-time wake-up call for all of us. I hope everyone is on the same page and we don’t rush coming back for the sake of entertainment. We all want it, but it’s got to be safe.”

Now the Currys are staying at home on the Peninsula with their three young children. Active 20-month-old Canon keeps everyone busy. Stephen, whose mother Sonya founded a Montessori school in North Carolina, has most of the home-schooling duties for their daughters Ryan, 4, and Riley, 7.

“Stephen has been spearheading that,” Ayesha said.

As far as basketball, there was a well-circulated account of Stephen assembling his own basketball hoop in his driveway, a five-hour project.

“I haven’t got anything done in terms of skill work, but I stay active,” he said. “I have a lot more time to lean into other things that are of more importance right now.”

And Stephen has leaned in, hard. He is thought to be the first NBA player tested for the disease, because he was suffering flu-like symptoms just as the crisis began unfolding. He has used his massive social-media platform — 30.2 million followers on Instagram and 14.2 million on Twitter — to inform and inspire during this crisis. He made a huge impact with a live Instagram question-and-answer with Dr. Anthony Fauci. He held an inspiring FaceTime call with nurses at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center. He has created an information landing spot on the disease, at sc30.com.

“It’s all about impact,” he said. “The things my wife and I try to do, separately and together, are to raise awareness, to find impactful partnerships, to be human and understand the urgency of the moment.”

The Currys encourage others to seek out food banks in their communities and make donations if they can.

“In the next weeks and months, if the government is not there, we need private citizens and groups like the Currys and mine to step in,” Andrés said. “There is so much hardship around the world. A lot of people don’t have such luck to have the Currys with their foundation to help.”

Ann Killion is a columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: akillion@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @annkillion