Imagine being a high school kid traveling to an out of state tournament. Think about the excitement your feeling about heading away from your parents for a couple days. The nerves over playing with different players and the pressure to impress coaches. The pure bliss of a road trip with your buddies.
Now, imagine how you’d feel if you were pulled over by state cruisers and they opened fire.
Not just once.
Not twice.
The police pulled a Rambo and emptied 12 rounds into your car.
This is the tragic story of Danny Reyes, Jermaine …

By Ryan McNeill
As a coach for an elementary school basketball team I’m always looking for a couple extra drills to add to my practices. I was looking at DVD’s this month and I came across one featuring Brian McCormick called “Great Ball-Handling Made Easy” that caught my attention. The cover wasn’t as flashy at the DVD’s by Better Basketball or Magic Johnson but after reading his book “Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development” last month I became a fan of his coaching methodologies and I assumed …

By Ryan McNeill
This weekend I was fortunate enough to watch the basketball documentary “With This Rock.” This DVD is an independent release and doesn’t have the same flash or production as ESPN’s “Through the Fire” or the ‘90’s classic “Hoop Dreams” but it does an excellent job capturing the politics and corruption involved with basketball in Flint, Michigan. The DVD begins with a scene from the Michigan State National Championship ceremony in Lansing but the documentary quickly changes gears to show that things weren’t all positive in Flint in 2000. …

This week I’ve mentioned the economic hardships of growing up in Flint, but I’ve received some emails reminding me that I’ve failed to provide you with stats to back this up. According to a 2000 census, 124,943 people live in Flint, it has an unemployment rate of 12.9% and 18,832,000 residents don’t have a diploma or GED.
Coach Swain from Delta College told Davenport that, “we don’t have no $30,000 jobs no more here now. It’s just keeping it real now in the hood. All we now is the court. That’s …

A lot of basketball fans are familiar with names like Morris Peterson, Mateen Cleaves, Charlie Bell, Eddie Robinson, Glen Rice and Latrell Sprewell, but there are lots of amazing basketball players from Flint that basketball fans haven’t heard of.
As most hoop fans know, basketball is full of stories about great playground players or high school prodigies who weren’t able to escape the clutches of the streets to play pro basketball. Sadly, Flint has it’s fair share of these stories as well.
One of those players is Eric Turner.
According to a Flint …

Earlier this month I was given a copy of the basketball documentary Flint Star by it’s director Marcus Davenport to view and then write about on Hoops Addict. When Marcus first approached me about writing about his documentary I was hesitant at because aside from Hoop Dreams there haven’t been any basketball documentaries that have impressed me.
I sat down this week to view the documentary with minimal expectations but I was so impressed by the documentary that it’s been playing every day on my DVD player since I popped it …