Teamwork, Location Drive Festive Hoopfest
If Hoopfest is truly a phenomenon - and it would seem to qualify - then by definition it should be explainable.
There should be an answer to the 21,337-player question:
Why Spokane?
How is it that our city has fertilized this ever-mushrooming 3-on-3 basketball carnival, officially the world’s largest with 5,425 teams undertaking their own version of downtown revitalization?
Why is Spokane, with a modest pedigree when it comes to producing major college players and only one NBA pro to its name, suddenly the streetball mecca of America?
Why not Indiana, home to the spirit of “Hoosiers” and Bobby Knight (and welcome to him)? Or Kentucky, where the sport is a Bluegrass passion?
Or somewhere on the mean city streets of New York or the tobacco roads of North Carolina - both places with infinitely more hoop history than here?
“We’ve asked ourselves that once or twice,” said Hoopfest executive director Rick Steltenpohl. “Back when we were running around making all those plans, how did we know anyone would do it?”
More to the point, how could they know more and more people would do it each succeeding year - the tournament now gobbling up street space on both sides of the Spokane River?
How could they know Hoopfest would become a holiday?
“That’s really what it is for our family,” said Sharmain Reuben, a 33-year-old adult caregiver who along with her sister, Sherry, and father, Arthur, has played in every tournament.
This year, 15 Reubens will play on courts scattered throughout downtown. When their various bracket sheets are collected during packet pickup on Friday, copies are run off and distributed to everyone in the family.
“Then we know when everyone’s playing,” Reuben said. “And on Saturday night, we have a big barbecue at our house, which is sort of Hoopfest headquarters. We have family in from Pendleton, Lapwai and up toward Canada. Basically, it’s the only time of year we see everybody. We see them more this weekend than we do during the holidays, even though some of them only live two hours away.”
That aspect - what Steltenpohl calls “the whole festival side of it” - is the barb on Hoopfest’s hook, and far more important than which team gets to 20 points first.
But basketball was the foundation, and remains so.
“It’s how the players judge us and how we judge ourselves,” Steltenpohl said. “Ultimately, how we did on the courts is the gauge.”
What must have been obvious to the 512 teams that played in the initial Hoopfest in 1990 is that co-founders Rick Betts and Jerry Schmidt and their helpers got the basketball details right. The proof was in the numbers - entries doubled the following year and haven’t stopped growing.
And what was obvious to Hoopfest officials is that they had a remarkable and fortuitous combination to goose the growth.
“We had a great location with Riverfront Park as the centerpiece,” said Steltenpohl, whose involvement dates to the first tournament. “And we have a community that is tremendous in supporting activities like this. Not just participating - and it’s a participation town - but the quality and numbers of volunteers we get are just staggering.”
As its cousin Bloomsday has demonstrated over a longer period of time, Hoopfest doesn’t go on without the volunteers - more than 2,000 of them, many whose work goes on all year long. Big as this basketball supermarket is, there’s a ma-and-pa grocery at its soul. It remains a dogged independent, while most other 3-on-3s have become mere franchises. The original Gus Macker in Michigan, with around 3,000 teams, is now in 75 cities nationwide with 200,000 players. Hoop It Up has 49 stops, the largest being a 3,000-team event in Dallas. Roundball Ruckus is in 56 cities.
But neither would the tournament have kept going this strong without the park and the downtown setting.
Tournaments in bigger cities are often relegated to bleak parking lots - Seattle’s was originally staged on the blacktop around the Kingdome. By comparison, Spokane is a destination resort.
“I bring my wife, I bring my kids,” said Cody Omlid of Stevensville, Mont. “We go shopping, we hang out in the park and they see Dad lose at basketball.”
Omlid owns Kodiak Jax restaurant in the Bitterroot Valley town south of Missoula. He and his two brothers have been coming to Hoopfest for seven years - always playing in the open division for the sake of competition “and feeling good if we make it to Sunday.
“It’s a getaway,” he said. “Over here, they have tournaments in mall parking lots. I try to tell people, `If you haven’t played in Hoopfest, you haven’t experienced anything.”’
Just 68 percent of Hoopfest’s participants come from the Spokane area. Fourteen percent come from elsewhere in Washington, 10 percent from Idaho and 5 percent - the equivalent of about 265 teams - from Montana.
“People like to do things here,” said Steltenpohl, “but you have fewer options than you do in Seattle. On this weekend, you’re not choosing between Hoopfest and five other things.
“And I think the dates are crucial. This is the perfect weekend. Most people are still around town. School has just gotten out and summer vacations tend to start with the Fourth of July. We still have something of a captive audience.”
And a captivated one.
“We’re not just about maintenance,” Steltenpohl said. “Our goal each year is to make it a better tournament in some way than it was the year before, and not just bigger.
“Our ego will take a hit at some point and the numbers will level off. But that won’t make it any less of a phenomenon.”