COLLEGE BASKETBALL
Suitcase Full of Cash Gives a Youth Program New Life
More than 200 students from Cardinal Newman Catholic School, in Brampton, Ontario, filed into the Canadian Broadcasting Centre to cheer on the popular eighth-grade teacher from Room 26. It was January 2007, and Mike George was about to be on television.
The game show “Deal or No Deal” had gone to Toronto, and George applied to be a contestant because he needed money. Not for himself: Half the winnings, George told the host Howie Mandel on the set, would go toward supporting his grass-roots youth basketball program, Characteristics Inspiring Achievement, or C.I.A.
Tyler Ennis, a 12-year-old basketball prospect who was in the audience, could cheer for that. He was in eighth grade at Cardinal Newman, and his father, Tony McIntyre, had recently paired his own youth team, Bounce, with George’s C.I.A.
So George played the game, picking suitcases based on the jersey numbers of his favorite N.B.A. players. He won $144,000. And, as promised, he put half into C.I.A. Bounce.
George and McIntyre bought new uniforms, equipment and gear. They chartered buses instead of piling 10 players into a minivan for trips. They even played in a tournament in France. With better financing, George and McIntyre no longer needed to reach into their own pockets or turn away players who could not pay the entry fee. They could travel beyond suburban Toronto to seek out teams in the United States. And sure enough, within five years, C.I.A. Bounce became one of the premier Amateur Athletic Union programs in North America.
Anthony Bennett (the No. 1 overall pick in last year’s N.B.A. draft) and Tristan Thompson (No. 4 in 2011) are among the program’s recent alumni. Nine others play for teams in this year’s N.C.A.A. tournament.
That includes Ennis, the freshman sensation for Syracuse, and his brother Dylan Ennis, a guard for Villanova; Iowa State’s Melvin Ejim and Naz Long; and Dayton’s Dyshawn Pierre. Another is Andrew Wiggins of Kansas, who could follow Bennett as the No. 1 pick in the coming N.B.A. draft.
This is how far $72,000 can go.
“Without that,” McIntyre said, “and without putting that money back into the program, I don’t think a lot of what we’ve done would have been possible.”
Ennis, the point guard for third-seeded Syracuse, which takes on Western Michigan in Buffalo on Thursday, said playing for C.I.A. Bounce once it truly took off was probably the reason he was able to play at Syracuse.
“It gave me a chance to come over here and play against the best competition, but also get recognized by schools,” Ennis said. “That’s the only way you can pretty much make it out of Canada to get the opportunity.”
George understood what needed to happen for Canadian youth teams to be noticed and respected by college recruiters and N.B.A. scouts. They needed to participate in the prominent A.A.U. tournaments in the United States — in Washington, Virginia, Florida and Kentucky. For that, they needed money.
George said it was a suggestion by his wife, Karen, that prompted him to fill out an application for “Deal or No Deal,” which, after a successful run in the United States, was going to Canada for a short run of episodes. He was one of more than 112,000 applicants.
“We just thought it would be fun,” George said.
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At the time, his fledgling basketball program was in its second year since it had combined forces with McIntyre, an operations manager at a Canadian pharmaceuticals company who had been coaching youth basketball in suburban Toronto for more than a decade. The two men had faced each other in tournaments for years, and a sort of rivalry had formed. One day, they called a truce.
“I hated Mike; Mike hated me,” McIntyre said. “But we decided that based on the fact that we were both going to these tournaments and doing so well, we’d sit down and have a discussion.”
Even with the pairing, money remained tight. McIntyre estimated he and George put $20,000 out of their own pockets into the program that first year to rent gyms, buy equipment and pay operating costs. But it hardly went far. C.I.A. Bounce was a yearlong program, not a summer dalliance, and the coaches all had full-time jobs elsewhere.
So when George considered applying to “Deal or No Deal,” he immediately consulted McIntyre about using C.I.A. Bounce as a way to attract the attention of the show’s producers.
“They loved the fact we had a program and the program had a lot of schoolteachers,” McIntyre said. “And we’re giving all these kids this great opportunity.”
George appeared on the third of five episodes and, naturally, he approached it like a competition. There was strategy involved. During one of the preshow interviews, a producer offhandedly asked him his favorite number (four). George sensed there had to be a reason for the question. He would stay away from suitcase No. 4.
On the day of the midweek taping, buses from Cardinal Newman took students to the television studio to watch, and a newspaper from Brampton covered the event. Members of C.I.A. Bounce were there, too, wearing their jerseys.
“We all got excited about it,” said Fred Albi, who was the principal at Cardinal Newman in 2007. “It was a huge story in town.”
At one point during a commercial break, some of the younger players from C.I.A. Bounce hopped on stage with basketballs and performed a dribbling routine.
“It was incredible,” George said, “just knowing you’re doing it for those kids.”
McIntyre said the prize money was a “kick-start” to getting C.I.A. Bounce where they wanted it to go. Three years after the show, Keith Stevens, the coach of the A.A.U. program Team Takeover, noticed them at a tournament in Washington and connected them with George Raveling, the international director of basketball at Nike. C.I.A. Bounce now plays on the Nike Elite Youth circuit.
George left the program to work for Excel Sports Management as an N.B.A. agent in May 2013 (McIntyre remains a coach). But George said he could not help but think back to that day in 2007 as a turning point for a lot of lives.
“It was one of those things where, you were just grateful for anything,” George said. “And for something like that to help where we were at as a program, it was just perfect timing.”
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