T.J. Newsham Wants to Know: Is Bay City Ready for Semi-Pro Basketball?
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T.J. Newsham is expansive in describing his ideas to energize basketball in Bay City.
Newsham describes how he analyzes basketball technology on computer.
Would you pay $5 a ticket to see young basketball players who may some day end up in the NBA?
That's what T.J. Newsham, basketball coach, analyst and entrepreneur, wants to know.
Newsham is a 31-year-old non-stop talking dynamo who is compiling a store of knowledge and basketball sagacity that rivals that of a Big Ten cage coach.
Youth and sports specialist at the Bay Area Family Y, Newsham also runs sports camps, works with individual players and analyzes performance of NBA players for Synergy Sports Technology.
At 6 foot five inches tall, he was an average scorer but top rebounder (12 points, 10 rebounds per game) under Coach Mike Debo at All Saints, graduating in 1994. Newsham attended Delta College and coached junior varsity basketball at All Saints.
While attending Fairmount State, West Virginia, he was an assistant basketball coach 2000-2003. He spent the past several years in Wilson, North Carolina, as a coach and trainer and running basketball clinics.
He coached the Bay City Blue Devils on the American Youth Basketball Tour in 1995, completed a 10-day internship with UCLA Coach Steve Lavin in 1998 and earned a certificates in two eight week courses in pro basketball general management and scouting from Sports Management World Wide at Eastern Washington University.
"I did pretty well in those courses and that got me the connection with Synergy Sports Technology," he said. Synergy has contracts with 24 pro teams and a few colleges to do video analysis of player performance, mostly for pre-draft purposes.
"This is a billion dollar industry and teams want to know what one player does more often or better than the other," he said. Spot-ups, hand-offs, pick and roll, what the player does coming off screens and in transition -- those are among the technical performance points Newsham analyzes using video of games on computer.
The impact of his work is shown in the following statement from perhaps the best basketball player ever to come out of Bay City:
"Coach Newsham gave me the fundamental foundation of my basketball game. It is fair to say that I wouldn't be half the player I am today without his tutelage in my younger years. If you really want to become the best basketball player within you, listen to what coach Newsham says, it works! He will get the most and then some out of you." --Eric Devendorf -- Junior Shooting Guard, Syracuse University.
He is also working with Brad Norman, Central High shooting whiz, Ryan Janer, Delta College star, and other local players to develop skills and prepare them for college ball.
Newsham is prospecting right now for support for an International Basketball League franchise that would place a developmental team here in the 2009 season.
"We would get guys ready for professional opportunities overseas," he said. "Some would be good enough to move into the NBA eventually."
The team, tentatively called the Bay City Brewers, would play 12 home games, perhaps in a venue like the Handy Junior High gym that is college size at 94 feet long and has adequate seating capacity.
Newsham would coach the team that would play a 22 game regional schedule against IBL teams like Battle Creek, Grand Rapids and Holland, Michigan, and Gary and Elkhart Indiana and Elgin, Windy City (Chicago) and Kankakee Illinois.
Grand Rapids would bring the world's tallest player, 7 foot 9 inch Sun Ming Ming, from China (Pictured at Right), into Bay City for games.
"I'd like to put energy and enthusiasm into local basketball," said a fired-up Newsham, who lives the sport. His two-year-old son, Breandan shoots hoops two hours a day in a six-foot rim in the basement. His 9-year-old, Trey, plays on the Y's traveling team that Newsham coaches.
The Brewers, or whatever name the local team is called, would need an annual budget of about $50,000 to get going. Training camp would be held in March and games would be played over three months, ending in June.
The league has developmental contracts with teams in China and Japan, he said, and teams from those countries will be coming to the U.S. next year to compete.
"These are athletes that love to run up and down and play like thoroughbreds," he exclaimed.
The league has a 22 second shot clock, only one time out per quarter. "Referees inbound the ball immediately, games are fast and over with in two hours," he said.
Average attendance at league games is 700 and the record crowd was 5,591. A total of 255 games were played by the 25 IBL teams in 2007.
IBL players are not paid and stay with host families in communities like Bellingham and Central Washington, Edmonton, Alberta, and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Seattle, Tacoma, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Portland, Salem and Central Oregon.
And, maybe some day, Bay City, Michigan.
League information may be accessed at iblhoopsonline.com.
Newsham's website is http://www.jjknhoops.com ###
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