Spring Basketball At Its Best

It felt like championship basketball inside the tiny gymnasium at Intermediary School 8, on the corner of 167th Street and 108th Avenue, near Merrick Boulevard in Jamaica.
Ten Division I players between the two teams - Karriem Memminger’s Shooting Stars and the Bronx-based Gauchos - the last quarterfinal of the day. Prep stars headed to the Big East, SEC and Atlantic 10 in the fall, keeping the capacity crowd permanently on its feet.
“It was crazy,” said the Syracuse-bound forward Mookie Jones, who made the trek to southeast Queens from upstate New York. “There was no let up, no time to rest, no time for mistakes.”
This was not a glorified All-Star game or a city championship. The basketball playoffs have long ended, its champions crowned. The primary spring sports - baseball, softball and tennis - are winding down, their postseason is beginning.
This was just an AAU tournament. Yet, when it comes to I.S. 8, there is no such thing.
“People play as hard here if not harder than they do during the regular season, and that’s not usually the case with AAU because there’s always the next game with AAU,” local talent evaluator Tom Konchalski said. “Here, especially in the playoffs, there’s no tomorrow.”
Pete Edwards, I.S. 8’s founder and director, started the tournament 24 years ago. After graduating from Thomas Edison and New York Tech and coming back home, he didn’t like what he saw in his old neighborhood, which had become drug-ravaged and poverty stricken.
Edwards, the deputy director for the New York City Housing Authority, started an unlimited tournament, but that would soon run its course. Therefore, he began a high school league, instituted rules everyone - fans, players, coaches - had to follow: no smoking or drinking, no fighting or arguing, no gambling or cursing.
Decades later it became a cannot miss event that is now sponsored by Nike. Edwards also runs the tournament in the fall and summer for high school players and the winter for younger kids. The spring is the elite event. LeBron James made a cameo one year. So did Michael Beasley. Stephon Marbury, Lamar Odom and Ron Artest are just a few of the other big names that have graced the since-refurbished court.
“There’s so much history here in I.S. 8,” said Syracuse recruit James Southerland, who comes off the bench for the Shooting Stars. “You feel like you earned something when you win.”
“This,” said Christ the King’s Erving Walker, also of the Shooting Stars, “prepares me for the SEC.”
Playing poorly can also earn a kid a tongue-lashing from Edwards, who primarily serves as the game’s announcer on the microphone. “Bring your game, not your name,” is his trademark phrase.
“There’s a lot of pressure,” Jones said.
“Pete Edwards makes it special,” Konchalski said. “It’s a great atmosphere. Put the same players together on a bigger court somewhere else, it wouldn’t be the same thing.”
This spring has its own marquee value. The defending champion Shooting Stars, who beat the Gauchos Sunday, in a thriller, 90-88, could potentially bring seven Division I players with them to the semifinals next week, including St. Benedict’s Prep product Samardo Samuels (Louisville); Long Island City’s Devin Ebanks, the top unsigned player in the nation; and Ed Davis, a 6-foot-8 power forward from Richmond, VA. who will attend North Carolina. They could meet the Playaz Club Seniors, basically the St. Anthony (Jersey City) basketball team, USA Today’s mythical national champions, with their five Division I seniors, in the final on Sunday.
The league started to expand several years back when Wally Szczerbiak, the Cold Spring Harbor product and Cleveland Cavaliers guard, played with the Long Island Panthers. He was easy to spot, Edwards said, because Szczerbiak was one of a select few Caucasians in the crowd.
“It helped transition the whole place,” Edwards said. “People were afraid to come to the neighborhood, but we changed that. Now everybody freely comes here without a problem.”