With any new nonprofit organization, even one that has a good business model, nobody can be certain that it will be successful in the long run.
Case in point is Redmond’s own Eastside Basketball Club (EBC), which opened in the summer of 2009 as a way kids looking to play competitive basketball could join an accredited Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team.
That opening season, founder Edward Nettles said that he had five teams in total.
In just two years’ time, that number has grown to 17 squads, encompassing grades 4-9 for both boys and girls as well as Elite-level high school teams.
“It’s been pretty amazing,” Nettles said on the club’s growth. “We’ve been able to come as far as we have, simply with good people. We wanted to get good quality coaching in here, and to do that we went out and got some of the top high school coaches.”
Coaches like Mike Angelidis and Keith Hennig, who have coached the Kentwood boys and girls to state titles in consecutive years, and Mike Kelly, a state-title winner in 2006 with Seattle Prep who has 13 former players playing at the collegiate level and two in the NBA.
EBC also attracted some local coaching flavor, as Josh Bollinger, a former assistant coach for the Bear Creek School boys’ team, and Todd Ruben, a Redmond resident, are also on staff.
“Under the guidance of those guys and some real good word of mouth from our existing members, we’ve been able to grow,” Nettles explained. “With that growth has come success as well. It’s been a fun ride, to watch it transpire.”
ELITE EIGHT
The club’s most crowning achievement came at last month’s Adidas Super 64 event in Las Vegas, as the boys’ Elite I team — comprised of some of the top Puget Sound-area players entering their senior year of high school — made an amazing run through the field before losing in the tournament quarterfinals.
The Super 64 is a nationwide prep basketball showcase, where scouts come in droves to watch the stars of tomorrow put their skills on display.
Unlike most of the top-tier teams that featured one or two standout players, EBC’s squad, from the start, set their sights on playing as a family, and winning.
“We really focused on becoming a team and playing as a team, as sometimes in AAU basketball it becomes not such a team game,” explained Ruben, the team’s head coach. “These guys have unbelievable personalities. They have good character, come from good families, and you could just tell they were really going to blend well together. When you play like a team, like a family, you can beat anybody, and that’s what they did.”
On their road to the “Elite Eight,” they beat Franchize All-Stars of Houston, and another Texan team in Family First, before edging out a very talented and deep D.C. Assault team from Washington, D.C., 59-57, in the Super 16.
“There was a moment in the D.C. Assault game where you could tell our guys made up their mind that they were not going to lose,” Nettles recalled. “They were going chest-to-chest with them, toe-to-toe, pushing, shoving. They were competing, and it spoke to what team is about, what good quality coaching is about, and really what basketball is about.”
Jason Harrington, a Redmond High senior and one of the team’s most consistent scorers in the event, said the experience of playing on that stage was surreal.
“We were the underdogs in every game we played,” he said. “They were all the top-ranked players by ESPN and stuff, and we just played as a better team. We played well together and it was just a lot of fun to play against those guys and beat them.”
Although their dream of a tournament title fell by the wayside to eventual runners-up Dream Vision of San Diego, which featured No. 1 recruit Shabazz Muhammad, Nettles was proud of what his club was able to accomplish on a national level in just two years’ time, comparing his team’s run to Butler’s recent successes in the NCAA Tournament, and Hoosier movies.
“Our (story) was real similar,” he noted. “It was a group of guys moving the basketball, playing the game the right way, a coach believing in them and motivating them. It was a lot of fun to watch.”
A COMMITMENT TO QUALITY
Moving forward, Nettles simply hopes to continue the formula that has made EBC successful, starting with the coaching.
“I don’t think I could have ever been prepared for what’s happened in the last year and a half, two years,” he admitted. “I knew that coaching was probably the thing that either makes you or breaks you, but the quality of coaching we’ve been able to attract — it’s really like no other AAU program.”
About a year ago, the regulation maple court at the EBC facility, just outside the west entrance to Marymoor Park, got a facelift and got extended to include an additional half-court.
Nettles added he plans to expand the facility further, adding side courts “allowing us to service more kids.”
And of course, he hopes to continue to attract talent from around the Puget Sound area, so EBC’s teams keep on making some noise on the court.
In addition to their Super 64 placing, the Elite I team won both the Northwest Hoops Spring Invitational and the Washington Premier Spring League Championships.
“With our program and the way it’s structured, kids, when they make our teams, can come to as many training classes as they want,” Nettles said. “I’ve noticed over the years it’s those kids that commit to that and come as often as they can and work their games on their own, are the ones you start to see that improvement in.”
One of those kids is Harrington, who will call upon all that experience when he leads the Mustangs, hopefully to a Kingco 4A title, this winter.
“In the past I’ve skipped around from club to club, and I came to (EBC) not knowing what to expect,” said the 17-year-old. “I fell in love with the coaching staff and how it’s run here. It’s more of a team setting, and if I had another year to play I’d definitely come back here. I’ve really enjoyed my time here, more than anywhere else.”
Eastside Basketball Club is located at 17455 NE 67th Ct., Suite 160 in Redmond. For more information, visit the website at www.eastsidebasketballclub.org.
