In the annals of odd sports juxtapositions, a Jamaican national basketball team descended on the sleepy Seattle suburb of Kirkland last week. They practiced for an international tournament inside the lone full court at Eastside Basketball Club, which shares that space, even, with other businesses—hence all the groups of toddlers … being led by teachers … tiny hands holding the same string … up the court’s sideline … right by practice.
“They” meant four players and three coaches, all of whom gathered inside the Bridle Trails Shopping Center, in an area of Kirkland that’s exactly how the name sounds. EBC sits between a chicken joint and a martial arts studio, nearby a hardware store, a bubble tea spot and a grocery market.
Kirkland is 11 or so miles by car from Seattle, which looms across Lake Washington like an older brother—the annoying one. The distance between both cities can be shortened for anyone with a boat. Kirkland is cozy but increasingly less cozy, with construction cranes all over the place. It’s home, Kirkland, to some 90,000 people. Mostly families. Like my own.
When someone asks me to differentiate Kirkland from any other greater-Seattle suburb, I start with that stuff. When their eyes inevitably glaze over, I invoke three facts, almost always. Kirkland is … 1) the first home of the Seattle Seahawks, 2) home to the original Costco, and 3) home to the nursing home where COVID-19 kicked off its ferocious U.S. tour. (Fact No. 2 isn’t even true, turns out. The first Costco was in Seattle—come on!—and the company headquarters moved to Kirkland in 1987.)
This leads to a rather depressing realization. The Seahawks built their waterfront palace down I-5, in Renton, moving there for good in 2008. But, “Hey, at least this fair city really sparked COVID’s spread!” cannot become Kirkland’s motto.
Anyway, the text message arrived in early December. Rick Turner, longtime international basketball coach and, like me, a Kirkland resident, had invited the Jamaican men’s national 3x3 team, which he coaches, to train in … what’s definitely not the home of the original Costco. Which is how those players and their other coach flew in from all over the world to practice for a basketball national team in a country where track-and-field towers above all other sports. Distance from Kirkland to Kingston: 3,265 miles.
All arrived during the coldest week of 2024 so far. Let that be a lesson about first impressions. I saw Turner’s text and thought, regrettably, Cool Runnings. Jamaican hoopers saw Kirkland and thought, Cold. It’s not that, cold, not here. For all the rain we get, lack of bone-chilling cold days marked a benefit. But these tall, athletic gentlemen nearly had to purchase winter coats before temperatures warmed this week.
Turns out, those fellas have a story of their own.
Consider Lushane Wilson. Springy and 6'7", he ranks among Jamaica’s best high jumpers and also competes in the triple jump. He won Olympic trials in that event but was not selected to represent his country at the Paris Games. (In Jamaica, those results are only part of the evaluation for slots.) He shakes his head and says, “Basketball was actually my first love.”
Wilson chose jumping on the track over leaping to block shots for the primary reason most multi-sports athletes in his country eventually funnel into track or field. If he wanted to be a high jumper, there were schools that would help him, starting after the primary level. If he wanted to be a forward, there weren’t any basketball training programs available to him until he began high school.
To describe Jamaica’s history in men’s hoops as proud would be an overstatement. But the island has produced many NBA pros. Its list started with Wayne Sappleton, the first Jamaican an NBA team ever drafted. It now includes: Patrick Ewing, Rumeal Robinson, Roy Hibbert, Jerome Jordan, Samardo Samuels, Omari Johnson and a trio of current pros: Norman Powell (Clippers), Nick Richards (Hornets), Josh Minott (Timberwolves).
In the more typical, five-on-five version of basketball, Jamaica the country has sometimes overperformed at tournaments. In the 2013 FIBA Americas Championship, its national team beat Brazil and Argentina.
None of those players or any of the NBA pros were training with this 3x3 team in wintery Kirkland. Sessions unfolded nonetheless. “We’re trying to get back into things,” Wilson says during a break in Monday’s practice. “Trying to get a program started, so we can start getting points here and there. That’s the main goal.”
To do that, they’re searching for athletes in a nation with no shortage of them. Basketball experience is necessary. But the best pool of players for all national teams cannot be chosen by basketball experience alone.
Hence the creativity in roster shaping. Some players on this 3x3 team came, like Wilson, from more than one sport. Some, like Jabs Newby, have always been primarily basketball players. Newby grew up in Brampton, Ontario, as the son of two Jamaican immigrants. He played for an elite AAU squad (CIA Bounce), then for two U.S. colleges (Eastern Kentucky, Gannon), then for professional teams all over the world.
While overseas in Spain, one teammate told Newby that he played for the Jamaican national team. Wasn’t Newby a citizen as well? He was. He is. He inquired about joining and that inquiry led him to Turner, now his 3x3 coach.
Turner had worked for—sigh—our local NBA franchise in a number of roles (intern, game operations, promotions, scouting, broadcasting). He left the Seattle Supersonics while they still existed in more than memories to pursue coaching full time. He always came back home. Basketball dribbled Turner from Seattle’s outskirts to the University of Washington, then, to the CBA and Great Falls, Mont.; then, to China, as an assistant in their pro league; then, to the NBA’s D League, before it became the G League.
Throughout this extended game of Where’s Turner?, one place—and one program—anchored all the other stops. That place was Jamaica, and that program is Jump Ball Basketball, the outreach organization, based in Kingston and started by longtime college coach and broadcaster Digger Phelps.
By the early 2000s, Phelps wanted someone else to take over. A Notre Dame student Phelps knew happened to be from Mercer Island, Wash., and this student recommended Ed Pepple, his legendary high school hoops coach. Pepple had also happened to give Turner his first post-Sonics assistant gig. The salary was … there was no salary. But Pepple heard all about Turner’s deep and curated interest in Jamaica and its basketball development. Turner had always loved that game, in that country. He started working the camps, mentoring coaches, developing prospects, bolstering pipelines. Eventually, Pepple tabbed Turner to take over around 20 years ago.
Turner never left. And, when Jamaica needed a men’s 3x3 coach in 2021, Turner became that, too. He found players or was connected to them, like with Newby, who had a brutal 2020—even by that year’s standards.
Amid the global pandemic, and during his best pro season yet, Newby tore his Achilles. The injury threatened what remained of his hoops dreams.
He hooked up with Turner. They traveled to El Salvador. They attempted to qualify for a larger tournament. Against odds so long nobody made them, behind a ragtag, thrown-together roster, they did. Then they won three more games, before losing to the U.S. in a close quarterfinal clash. The Americans won the whole tournament.
Which cemented the status of 3x3 in Jamaica. But fashioning a single competitive team had been difficult. Keeping it together, improving it, well, that stuff proved more elusive. Newby, for instance, hasn’t played 3x3 for Jamaica from that tournament until now. He was too busy trying to keep his pro basketball aims alive. He arrived in Kirkland last week by way of China.
Finding players—enough of them, with enough talent—became a primary mission for Turner and others tasked with the future of basketball in Jamaica. Which is where Rohan Robinson came in.
Robinson grew up in Kingston, the country’s capital city, near miles of beachfront and the Ministry of Education. As a child, surrounded by both joy and poverty, he could walk to a large, nearby park. There were courts there. They were used for more than basketball. He had to get to an open one before soccer players could claim the court.
His father was in the Army, and, after he died, Robinson still attended high school at the base nearby. One day he spied something he didn’t know existed. A satellite dish. Showing NBA basketball games, whenever, wherever, they took place. He already loved Ewing, the best Jamaican who ever played their game. But he fell in love with Kareem and Magic and Bird, thus falling more in love with basketball. Soon, he fell onto the national team, after a local politician noted his hoops diligence and passed over a business card.
Robinson played for Jamaica’s more typical men’s national team from 2000 through ’09. He started coaching while he played, first for a female youth development team that won nationals after having won two games in the previous four years.
Jamaican sports officials continued to promote Robinson after he retired. He found ways to innovate, to make due with less. All national teams improved. Some, like that 2013 squad, forced a nation that loves to celebrate into rare basketball celebrations.
Long before 3x3 became an Olympic sport, Robinson noticed something else. Jamaicans were built to excel in half-court hoops. Many were athletic, tall leapers who could utilize the space above the other players confined to the smaller courts. Those players were creative because they had no other option, at least if they wanted to keep playing. When they didn’t have goals, they used milk cartons, light posts or anything nearby that could differentiate makes and misses.
The island’s biggest basketball tournament featured a 3x3 showcase, even. The grand prize in 2006: a trip to Miami, all-expenses paid, to watch the Heat. Robinson’s team won. He went. Watched. Fell deeper. Then he went back and ensured more and more development. Businesses became sponsors for local teams. He played for the Bank of Jamaica. Now, there’s more infrastructure, more talent, more tournaments. More refined talent. Better, deeper national teams. Stronger pipelines with more athletes.
Everyone involved needs more, of everything. But for someone like Newby, whose parents left Jamaica for Canada in search of a “better life,” there’s real significance in what has shifted and how far.
The 3x3ers from Jamaica left Kirkland early Tuesday morning and hopped on another flight. Destination: Puerto Rico, for the FIBA 3x3 AmeriCup. They are scheduled to play three games on Thursday as the tournament begins.
They need to win those games. If they do, they will earn points. And from those wins and those points, they will receive attention, accolades and perhaps the support they really need to turn Jamaican basketball into the more they all want the most. Turner, for one example, helped Newby obtain a sponsorship with an athletics apparel company. That’s one step. Another: players want to remind Jamaicans that there are more sports than track-and-field. That there are Olympic spots outside of track-and-field.
Say they do well. Say the NBA players from Jamaica take notice. Say the next star hooper does. All believe that Jamaica can imprint international basketball. But the next steps are the hardest they will take.
Still, Cedella Marley, the iconic singer’s daughter, has already pledged to help with funding, which she did for the national women’s soccer team, which then made the most recent World Cup. Wilson, for the record, has never seen Cool Runnings.
There are Jamaicans who find that movie both inspirational and overstated. It sparked no boom in winter sports. But these four, the two players above, along with Xavier Sewell and Nicolai Brown, they’re not basketball novices. Their movie is already further along.
All gathered Monday night at Moss Bay Hall, a local watering hole in good, old downtown Kirkland. The night, where players met sponsor types that Turner has recruited, felt like a walk-into-a-bar joke.
But this story isn’t a cute story meant to inspire a nation. Their story, Turner says, is of a sleeping giant soon to be awakened. Kirkland might not have the original Costco. But maybe we’re at the start of another movie about Jamaican athletes in a sport they’re not necessarily identified with. You know, Cool Hoopings. Maybe. Stay tuned.
More Olympics on Sports Illustrated
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Cool Hoopings: Inside the Making of Jamaica’s 3x3 Men’s Basketball Team.
