As anyone who has visited this page, or my personal homepage, will learn quickly that I spend a lot of time with basketball. In addition to being a fan and student of the game, I also work as a assistant freshman coach at Robinson HS, and as a head coach for the Fairfax Stars AAU Basketball organization. Basketball coaching was my original career aspiration when I left for college, and my summer job between HS and college was as a counselor at a basketball camp. I've worked at clinics as a coach in NJ, PA, and VA since the 1970s.
For the past 15 years I have been coaching youth basketball at a variety of levels in NY, NJ, and VA. Here is a photo my U16 Fairfax Stars AAU team right before they played for the championship in the bronze bracket of the Hoop Group's Southern Invitational Tournament at the University of Virginia. The boys exhibited great team play throughout the tournament as 4 different boys led the team in scoring over the course of the tournament (Allen Stalp #20 [twice], Stephen Boettke #5, Mo Ibrahim #42, and Spencer de Mars #32). And in most of the games all 11 boys scored at least 1 basket, and contributed in numerous other ways to the teams effort with rebounds, assists, steals, hustle plays and smart play. We beat 2 teams from NJ, and 1 team from DC, but lost in our pool play to a team from Baltimore, and then in the final of the bronze bracket to Team Kobe (a team sponsored by Kobe Bryant -- the practice of NBA players sponsoring AAU teams is now common place; hard for an economics professor to compete with that!!!). We cut the lead to 8 midway through the second half, but they never let us get closer and in the end just proved too big and talented. But the boys really played well, and I can only hope that we can build on this as we enter a very challenging summer schedule that includes trips to Mass., and West Virginia, and perhaps to Tenn., and Florida.
With regard to the picture, I am the guy on the left --- for you 
basketball watchers, in my prime I had a body that sort of resembled Pearl Washington --- in shape but with thick thighs, and a big butt; now my body type is more along the lines of the great coach Rick Majerus. I am trying to fix that, but haven't been as successful as I would have hoped.
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