It was Saturday afternoon I could not tell you the time, as I laid on the cemented floor besides a wooden bench. The cell had a very strong urine-scent to it and the temperature was an estimated 90 degrees. I thought to myself “why the hell is the heat on in April”. The floor had its own odor to it, so to avoid any infection I tucked my arms and head into my shirt. Their where seven other people cramped into this single holding cell. I did not know them personally but we all had one thing in common, we did not want to be there. As I waited for my charge papers to be processed, I just keep saying to myself I hope the boys pull out the win.
I always loved basketball and at the age of 22 my best friend and I had an opportunity to coach our own 14 and under AAU team. During that time in my life I was in the process of realizing how my actions and immature ways were hindering my personal development as an adult. As well as how it affected the relationship that I had with the kids on my basketball team.
Ty and I could have never expected that we would have second chance to coach our own AAU team. Suge was an old friend from the neighborhood and he was talking to us in the barber shop about a program him and his friend Poo were running down Patterson Park. Suge told us that they had received funding to run their own program. But the only problem was their lack of coaches for each age group. Ty and I had previous experience coaching down Chick Webb on Monument Street a couple years back. The reason we stop coaching was because of the politics. We would recruit players, work them out in the gym, bring them back and forth from their home to practice and even buy our players food never asking anyone for a dollar. The agreement we had with the director of the program was that the team would be our team exclusively. But when it came time for us to go out of town to play in tournaments the program would get another coach to coach our kids. So after they pulled...