Philadelphia Youth Basketball Uses Hoops to Help Inner City Kids

This week, the thrilling NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament gets underway. As a sports fan, it's one of my favorite times of the yr, filled with rattling emotions: the high-fiving athletes, the crying cheerleaders, the blood vessel-popping coaches. Unfortunately, I also simply started reading Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, by New York Times columnist Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss, and information technology has me checking my enthusiasm and wondering: Can 1 be a sports fan and take a social conscience?

This is not a new conundrum. Scout the film Concussion, which documents the NFL's lies when information technology comes to its epidemic of life-threatening head injuries; the league finally admitted the truth only this week. Or read most how the $10 billion league pays its cheerleaders below minimum wage…and tell me you don't experience complicit in a socially irresponsible endeavor. Beingness a fan of the NFL has somehow become akin to cheering for Large Tobacco. Concluding year, I was similarly bummed when my Sixers—I'chiliad a long, long, long suffering fan—announced they'd be moving their offices to Camden, taking with them some 200 jobs.

As sports and big business accept merged, information technology'due south as if social responsibility in sports has become a quaint notion belonging to a more innocent past. Nocera and Strauss lay blank the sham that is "amateur" intercollegiate athletics, exposing a systemic exploitation of young, primarily black athletes by institutions that purport to be places of wisdom.

A few years ago, when Turner Broadcasting and CBS paid $11 one thousand thousand for the rights to televise the NCAA tournament, Denizen correspondent Charles Barkley, who will once once more exist broadcasting the games and starring in some hilarious March Madness commercials with Spike Lee and Samuel Fifty. Jackson, had this to say: "I'm concerned most the NCAA not graduating these players. They aren't paying the players. I'grand not going to go on a bluster well-nigh where the money goes, but you take an obligation to graduate these players."

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera has laid bare the sham that is "apprentice" intercollegiate athletics, exposing a systemic exploitation of young, primarily black athletes past institutions that purport to be places of wisdom. Information technology'due south unconscionable, and especially uncomfortable for those of u.s.a. raised to believe that our pop culture sports fanaticism has long aligned with our sense of egalitarianism.

Since Barkley'south challenge, graduation rates take risen, but they're still non adept. The graduation rate for NCAA Sectionalization I men'due south basketball game players is notwithstanding considerably less than the national average for total-time male students, and that'south peculiarly so when information technology comes to blackness athletes. That's because Division I basketball (and football, for that matter) have become besides large to neglect. Many athletic departments have budgets in excess of $100 one thousand thousand and are effectively split, cocky-sustaining entities on otherwise academic campuses. Recently, the New York Times captured the miracle in a disturbing investigation of the exploitation of a prized recruit past former Sixers coach Larry Brown, whose Southern Methodist University team, every bit a upshot, is currently banned from playing in the NCAA Tournament.

It's unconscionable, and especially uncomfortable for those of united states of america raised to believe that our pop culture sports fanaticism has long aligned with our sense of egalitarianism. After all, the Civil Rights motion didn't really begin with Brown v. Lath of Education; it really started seven years earlier, when Jackie Robinson broke baseball game'due south color line. Opposition to the Vietnam War didn't start with Eugene McCarthy'south and Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaigns; information technology was really Muhammad Ali's "I own't got no quarrel with them Vietcong" public statements that began to turn the tide confronting a wrongheaded military action. In the final few years, the historically homophobic sports industry has even embraced the coming out of NBA player Jason Collins and linebacker Michael Sam, and celebrated Caitlyn Jenner.

Still, when schools similar the Academy of Connecticut two years ago won the NCAA title while graduating all of 8 percent of its players, it's like shooting fish in a barrel to become down every March. Simply then a conversation I had with Kenny Holdsman reminded me not to blame a subculture for ills that accept long affected the culture at large. "Basketball," Holdsman said, "is a game that disregards and disrespects lines of ethnicity, neighborhood, and economical difference." That'south why he plans on using it to achieve kids throughout Philadelphia in order to teach academics and life skills and build character.

Holdsman is the CEO of Philadelphia Youth Basketball, an ambitious undertaking and a tonic for the malaise that comes when reading our sports page headlines. Philadelphia Youth Basketball is a nonprofit that was announced late last yr, featuring a long list of luminaries from the metropolis'south basketball and philanthropic communities. Holdsman, who previously ran Legacy Lawn tennis (formerly chosen Arthur Ashe Tennis) in Manayunk, put together an eclectic group—ranging from Temple Charabanc Fran Dunphy to philanthropist Janet Haas to venture capitalist and Denizen founding donor Wayne Kimmel; they're raising $25 million to build a state-of-the-fine art sports and education facility in partnership with the civically-minded Goldenberg Grouping, the outset step of a much-needed redevelopment of the 40-acre wasteland known equally the Logan Triangle in N Philly. (The site, famously, of sinking homes back in the tardily '80s).

Philadelphia Youth Basketball court rendering.
Philadelphia Youth Basketball court rendering.

There are numerous sports-based youth development organizations doing great work throughout Philly, using sports as a claw to attain inner-urban center kids. There'south the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation, which wraps the broccoli of graphic symbol development, life skills, and academics in the fun of ice hockey. There's the Cadence Cycling Foundation, started by the dynamic Ryan Oelkers, which similarly uses cycling equally a way to holistically serve city kids. There's nonprofit SquashSmarts, which bills itself as keeping "Philadelphia public schoolhouse students in school, in shape, and on track for graduation." And there'southward a local affiliate of Up2Us Sports, which posits that "sports is not 'just a game' —it's one of the most powerful tools to positively transform kids' lives."

But Philadelphia Youth Basketball is arguably the nearly ambitious undertaking notwithstanding. Holdsman and his team have eschewed the typical nonprofit blueprint of crawling earlier walking, and walking before running. They're in a sprint, so much then that, at the behest of Temple Coach Fran Dunphy, they've started pilot programs serving roughly eighty kids at Temple and a scattering of schools, even before they've started to build their arena. "We can't wait two years to build the facility," Dunphy implored at an early meeting of the group at the Ballard, Spahr law business firm, later on hearing Holdsman point out that 52 percent of children of color don't graduate high school in Philadelphia. "We've got to start reaching kids right abroad."

Ultimately, the program is to serve over 7,000 kids at the Logan facility, which will include eight indoor and six outdoor basketball game courts, a 2,000-seat stadium court, classrooms and computer labs, workout facilities, wellness and wellness services, and a healthy-foods cafeteria.

The vision took shape while Holdsman was at Legacy Tennis and people similar former Villanova standout and NBA actor Alvin Williams and Simon Gratz High School basketball game omnibus Bill Ellerbee told him they loved that he was trying to attain inner-city youth…but why use lawn tennis as the claw? Why not, Ellerbee suggested, embrace a sport already beingness played throughout all parts of the city?

"Basketball," says Philadelphia Youth Basketball CEO Holdsman, "is a game that disregards and disrespects lines of ethnicity, neighborhood, and economic departure. If 100 of our kids wind up playing college ball, nifty. But if we can increase the percentage of kids who graduate high schoolhouse and go on to college, that'south fifty-fifty greater."

Holdsman, whose background is in educational development, is too versed in educational pedagogy as he is in hoops terminology. He quotes the findings of Angela Duckworth, the Penn researcher known for her groundbreaking work on dust, when he argues that resilience can exist taught. And he rattles off names of area educators on his squad, including Dave Felsen, the sometime headmaster at Friends Cardinal School.

"This is not about developing basketball players," Holdsman says. "There are whatsoever number of playgrounds in Philly where kids are playing every twenty-four hours. But this will be the place that couples that with positive coaching relationships, and curriculum built around sportsmanship, resilience, conflict resolution, bookish support and leadership and character development. If 100 of our kids wind upwards playing higher ball, cracking. But if we can increment the percentage of kids who graduate high school and get on to college, that's even greater. That'due south what success looks like."

It'due south a very non-Philly matter, this rejection of growing incrementally. Holdsman and his team — which includes one-time Sixer Aaron McKie—are thinking big. And they're not forgetting that, in Philly, basketball is all virtually middle. They've launched a social-media campaign, "I Am Philadelphia Basketball game," request city residents to postal service curt videos explaining the game's importance to them.

Information technology got me thinking back to the '70s of my youth in this metropolis, a hotbed of hoops. I'd make pilgrimages to Penn's storied Palestra, absorbed past the romanticism of local kids going to local universities and colleges, waging holy hardwood state of war. In South Philly, a guy named Dr. J had the coolest nickname and Afro going, and he showed a generation of white and black kids alike that it was possible to fly. I flashed back on myself in the driveway of my suburban youth, with my delusional loftier-flying dreams. That was before our sports became so corporate and soulless. But Holdsman would maintain that, while the culture at large may have changed, the game hasn't; it tin can however inspire young people to dream and achieve.

Photo Header: Courtesy of Philadelphia Youth Basketball game

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/philadelphia-youth-basketball-hoop-dreams/

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