Holding court: Spokane’s claim as ‘Hooptown USA’ is secure as playgrounds remain busy ahead of Hoopfest

To hear the Spokane Daily Chronicle tell it, basketball began in the city the night of May 26, 1899.

It was not a high-scoring affair. The final tally was 5 to 3 in an exhibition between two local teams. The tip took place just eight years after Dr. James Naismith invented the game at Springfield College in Massachusetts.

“As most of the players are unused to the game, there were frequent fouls on account of running with the ball and shoving,” reported the newspaper of that first game, that took place at the city’s YMCA meeting place in the Blake Building at Riverside Avenue and Post Street downtown. “But (the referee) kept the players well in hand.”

Nearly 125 years later, Spokane sports the moniker of “Hooptown USA” in large part due to its 3-on-3 basketball tournament, Hoopfest, which will tip for its 33rd year of existence on Saturday. The nonprofit running the tournament, and several community partners, have helped build and clean up blacktops around town.

But if you cruise any of the streets of the Lilac City for several weeks in late spring and early summer, whether it’s a lunch break or just as the streetlights are about to come on, you’ll see that the people of the city have just as much to do with that name as the event itself.

Here are some of those stories, from the playgrounds of Spokane.

G-Prep seniors soak in last days of high school at Comstock

A full court is at a premium at Comstock Park’s blacktop on any given early summer afternoon, and a gaggle of Gonzaga Prep seniors usually makes the most of it.

“We decided to do ‘king of the court,’ to like, five,” Nick McGann said, as he watched several of his buddies set up for another game at the court on a recent Thursday afternoon. “Just quick games, and the winning team stays on and the losing team switches.”

McGann and his friends estimated they’d spend several hours on a good afternoon mixing and matching teams, as players swap out to head home for dinner or, on this day, attend a graduation party. They’ve been known to use their cars’ headlights when the sun dips down behind the trees at the upper South Hill park, they said.

“When you’re older, everyone will get jobs, go off on their own,” said Matthew Benson. “It’s just, the last couple of weeks of school I’ve been trying to make the most of everything before I have to move away.”

Lance Harvey was stopping for a few games before heading home to Spokane Valley. He’s been playing here for the past three or four years, he said.

“At school, we were just talking about it. I decided to show up and see if anybody was here,” Harvey said.

Sometimes the guys had to get creative while waiting to hop into a game. Cristian Martinez held a phantom microphone with his fist and narrated the action while his friends, both those playing and watching, chimed in with their own commentary.

“I’ve been playing since I was a sophomore, after quarantine and everything,” Martinez said. “Mostly, it was like a summer thing, before I had a car. Now, it’s more like a spring and summer thing.”

The players call their own fouls, just like on the Hoopfest court. When a tight-scoring game ends with a clutch shot, there’s a refrain asking to “run it back,” or play another game with the same teams to determine superiority, much to the chagrin of those waiting on the sidelines.

But the final score isn’t the most important thing on these late spring afternoons, McGann said.

“Yesterday, I was here from about 5 to 7:30, playing with the same eight guys,” he said.

‘Banana Kings’ prepare for first Hoopfest appearance at Roosevelt Elementary

For 9-year-old Crosby Olson, the similarities between his time on the soccer pitch and the basketball court at South Hill’s Roosevelt Elementary are pretty apparent.

“It’s similar with the dribbling. The word’s the same,” Crosby said.

He’s one of a four-member team of third-graders coached by Alex Dobbins that includes Dobbins’ son, Owen. They’ve dubbed themselves the “Banana Kings,” after a teammate’s online gaming persona, and can be seen Monday afternoons practicing plays outside the school they attend during the day.

They’re playing on the 10-foot baskets, Viggo Robson explained, because the 7-foot goals closer to the school are for littler kids.

“We play the big ones, because those are too easy,” a grinning Viggo, also 9, said. At their age level, the Banana Kings will be playing on 8-foot baskets when they take the Hoopfest court on Saturday.

The boys fired shots from all over the pavement under the watchful eye of Alex Dobbins, who’ll be playing in his 20th Hoopfest this weekend. His team, called the “Significant Others,” will be made up of the husbands of a group of good female friends, he said.

“Our T-shirts are just going to be pictures of our wives,” Dobbins said, with each player sporting one photo of their own spouse, just to keep everyone straight.

Dobbins guided the youngsters through a half-hour of drills, including passing to the open court and using the backboard for a lay-up. Though none of the players have participated in Hoopfest before, they all expressed enthusiasm for getting on the court later this month. They were also full of questions.

“Are we going to be playing outside?” Crosby asked, after launching a jumper from the free-throw line.

“Why is it so hard to shoot from there?” Owen asked, after rimming out a shot from the post.

Alex Dobbins said his son has been showing an interest in basketball over the past few months with his friends. He bought a Golden State Warriors jersey for Owen at a recent NBA game – No. 11, Washington State University alumnus Klay Thompson.

“He’s been wearing that to every practice,” Alex Dobbins said.

Before splitting for the day, as the summer sun beat down, Alex Dobbins made sure the Banana Kings got in one last successful shot at practice.

“You guys are doing great,” he said. “I figured out, I probably don’t need to coach you guys. You’re probably going to win it all, anyways.”

The Banana Kings giggled.

Alex Dobbins said he hadn’t had any coaching experience, but in helping out with his son, he gets to remember what it was like when he was a kid.

“It’s a lot of fun for me,” he said. “I get to relive all those memories of playing basketball with my dad.”

‘You can usually get a pickup game going here’ – Riverfront Park offers friends, single players opportunity to join a game

The sun is just about at baking temperature by the time Brandon Holland, Maybelle Smith, Emily Troyer and their friends make it to Riverfront Park’s central Hoopfest courts on Tuesday morning. It’s not always so hot when this group, made up largely of workers at Holy Family Hospital, starts hooping.

“We wore sweatpants and sweatshirts, the first game (this year),” Smith said.

Today, Troyer slathers on sunscreen and Holland breaks a sweat as he’s putting up jumpers to practice. The weekly games just started organically four or five years ago, when Holland and Smith were talking about basketball during shifts at the hospital.

“It’s a mental health thing,” Holland said. “I have a real passion for it. It gives me a chance to clear my mind.”

Holland, who’s from Los Angeles, also got to see much of the city by jumping around from court to court, introducing his coworkers to new parts of the city. He’s partial to the court at Peaceful Valley, but the Riverfront Park courts – which opened in summer 2021 – were centrally located for his coworkers, and usually there’s some other players around who are interested in joining in.

Hunter Clark was shooting alone on a recent Wednesday morning in the sun, after his trip to the gym but before his shift at work. It’s not usually so empty, he said.

“You can usually get a pickup game going here,” he said. “The people are pretty cool.”

In fact, Clark met a few other guys looking for a Hoopfest team, and they signed up. He’ll play his first Hoopfest next week on “The Oddballs.”

Troyer started playing basketball in the sixth grade, playing at courts on the north side of Spokane.

“I played in AAU. I played at Mount Spokane,” she said. “Then I went to Eastern (Washington University), and I played intramurals the whole time I was there.”

Nursing school limited the amount of time she could play, but in this game, Troyer was posting up against Smith with the learned skill of a longtime player. Most of her friends said they were out there, getting in a workout and blowing off some steam before heading back to jobs that have been in even higher demand in recent years.

“I feel like it’s pretty cool to move to a place that supports basketball so much,” Holland said. “Then I started seeing ‘Hoopfest,’ and I thought, you know, this is really a basketball town. I love it.”

Team ‘Dead to Me’ pulls in parents to prep for team’s first Hoopfest at Thornton Murphy

Audrey Taylor has her work cut out for her, wrangling a quartet of 10-year-olds itching for summer vacation and their first Hoopfest experience.

“I know you’re shooting around. Why don’t you practice layups, like five layups on the right, and five layups on the left?” Taylor suggested on a recent Sunday evening, after watching her son, Dalton Terry, and his teammate, Abisha Sartoe, goof around with some jumpers at Thornton Murphy Park.

Audrey Terry, who comes from a basketball family, coached the guys in Hooptown’s youth basketball league last fall. Hoopfest is a way to keep them engaged with the game as they wind down from other sports at the end of a long spring, she said.

Some of those sports haven’t yet ended. Marcus Miller was late to practice because of baseball and traffic on the South Hill, but came bounding up to the court with a smile and his baseball socks after a few minutes.

“You get to partner up with a lot of new people, and you get to know people more,” said Miller, who has played in three Hoopfests. “You get to learn a lot about basketball, because you’re going to practice every week.”

That practice includes some of the parents, and wayward, out-of-shape print journalists showing up for a Sunday scrimmage. The boys practiced pick-and-rolls, and clearing the ball out to the three-point line after a rebound.

As part of a partnership announced in 2019 between MultiCare, the Hoopfest nonproft and Spokane Arts, muralists have brought their designs to five of the public courts Hoopfest has built in parks around town. Thornton Murphy, one of the parks that received the mural treatment with a river-inspired design by Nick Goettling in 2021 , is a perfect central location for players on the team, said Audrey Terry.

“Thornton Murphy is pretty decent,” she said. “Some of the older kids play there, teenagers. I’ve seen adults play there, too.”

There’s also the added benefit, on a hot summer day, of a splash pad within walking distance of the court. Siblings of the members of this team, dubbed “Dead to Me” by Marcus Miller because of a song he found on YouTube that he liked, ran over to the water while the boys went through their paces.

Sure enough, halfway through practice a group of similarly sized youngsters asks to join in, and an impromptu four-on-four, full-court contest gets underway.

Colton Fox, the team’s fourth, likes to put up shots but also sees complementary skills for his other sport, football. On that Sunday, he was setting screens for his teammates and rolling to the key, his arms up asking for the ball.

“My very first house we lived in, and I grew up in, we always came to this park,” Colton said.

Under the bridge downtown

Noah McNeely, who just graduated from Rogers High School, was making a DoorDash delivery a few weeks ago in Peaceful Valley when he saw it.

A colorful basketball court, tucked between tresses of the Maple Street Bridge. McNeely called his friend, Hunter Dehn.

“I said, you’ve got to write down this address,” McNeely said earlier this month, taking a break between games at the court that’s been in the neighborhood since 1977 but recently received an artistic update.

Peaceful Valley was the first Hoopfest court to get the mural treatment in summer 2020 from local artist Tiffany Patterson. Other courts covered in art are at Riverfront, Franklin and Chief Garry parks, and there are plans to paint a mural at Liberty Park in the future.

The Peaceful Valley court offers the urban feel of a traditional blacktop, along with humming traffic overhead. That bridge also partially blocks the rain and sun, and McNeely and his friends can be downtown in a few minutes, if they want to be. They’re also just a few minutes’ walk to the banks of the Spokane River.

McNeely and Dehn grew up next to each other and have been playing together for years, they said. When McNeely’s not working, he’s looking for a game, and recently met up with William Stensgar for a few pickup contests at Peaceful Valley, which both players said lives up to its name.

“It’s usually pretty chill,” said Stensgar, 29. “It’s a gathering spot, for sure. All types of walks of life.”

McNeely said games under the bridge are still physical, but not as tough as in other parts of town.

“Anybody I’ve played here, they’ve been really good to play with,” he said.

Dehn, McNeely and their friends headed right over to Peaceful Valley after finishing up their last day of high school. They grabbed some food, sent out a group chat to come to the park and ended up with eight guys for games throughout the afternoon.

Stensgar has a daughter who turned 1 recently, and he said it’s a safe place to bring her as well as get in his games, which have been fewer since he’s become a dad. He, too, spent some time at Rogers before going back to school in Wellpinit, and then playing for Northwest Indian College in Bellingham.

He’s played Hoopfest in the past, and thinks the activity on the courts around town ramps up just as school is winding down.

“The years that (Hoopfest) wasn’t around, you could really feel that it just kind of took the energy out of the summer,” he said. “I feel like it’s always a kick-off for most basketball players around here. It’s almost like a second Christmas; you’re just waiting for it.”