Local legends ready to hoop it up

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This article was published 28/07/2023 (1143 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

All it took was a flop for Clavin Diaz and Joseph Medrano to bring a slam-dunk event to Winnipeg’s basketball community for the first time.

Diaz, 26, grew up playing basketball in Garden City before attending St. Paul’s High School. It was in 2015, as he was getting ready to graduate, that a friend invited him to play in an alumni basketball tournament being held at Sturgeon Heights Collegiate.

While an innovative idea, the tournament lacked structure, according to Diaz.

“There was a handful of St. Paul’s guys but the team wasn’t really St. Paul’s and I showed up with my own jersey,” said Diaz. “There wasn’t really that sense of an alumni community, so it kind of sparked my interest, and obviously, basketball is a sport that really never goes away. Everybody is interested, everybody wants to hoop and it’s a hobby that never dies.”

With that in mind, the idea to bring the first citywide high school alumni basketball tournament to Winnipeg was born. After one previously failed attempt to get things off the ground due to the pandemic in 2020, the idea is finally coming to fruition.

The Run it Back Alumni Basketball Tournament will feature 15 teams across two divisions — Legends and All-Time — and re-ignite storied rivalries at downtown’s Sport for Life Centre, Aug. 12-13.

The Legends division, which consists of nine teams competing in a double-elimination bracket, is the more competitive of the two categories. It comprises players who graduated from 2004 to 2022, ranging from individuals who stopped playing after high school to those who played post-secondary and even pro.

The more recreational All-Time division, is a four-team group that begins with a round-robin followed by a single elimination tournament to determine the winner.

Winners will hoist a trophy and take home some T-shirts for their efforts. More importantly, they’ll have all-time bragging rights.

“The idea behind the name itself is that we wanted to give the hoopers a sense of camaraderie and being able to get the opportunity to run it back with the squad or players that they wouldn’t have necessarily gotten the opportunity to,” Diaz said.

After his poor experience at his first alumni tournament, Diaz got the chance to put his thoughts into action while taking a Program Planning in Sport class at the University of Winnipeg. The assignment, he explained, was to outline a full event plan, including sponsors and how he would run the tournament.

Diaz received an admirable grade for his idea, but more importantly, his wheels began to turn.

“I was like, man, if this was a real thing we could put this into reality,” he said.

Diaz promptly reached out to Medrano, a well-known figure in the basketball community from his time playing at the University of Manitoba and U of W, and the pair quietly got to work.

After their failed attempt during the pandemic, they kept working behind the scenes over the next two years and finally set their plan in motion this spring, working with Basketball Manitoba on the logistics of the tournament before they could begin sharing their idea with the public.

It didn’t take long for teams to begin flooding in once registration opened.

“The reception and feedback has been great,” Diaz said. “Once we created a social media platform — I mean, the basketball community is so supportive and it’s a closely knit group where even if you’ve played recreational basketball, everyone’s a familiar face.

“We were just discussing what kind of ways we could impact the basketball community in Winnipeg, in a way that hasn’t really been done before.”

jfreysam@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @jfreysam