5,000 Teams and Counting

Fifteen years ago, Greg Raleigh held a 69-team youth basketball tournament in Newton. In early June, 15 years after the first edition of the tournament, it hosted 700 teams playing at approximately 50 different sites located in the greater Wichita area. Mid-America Youth Basketball's flagship tournament, the Summer Kickoff, has become one of the deepest youth basketball fields in the nation. "We really had no vision for MAYB when it started," says Raleigh, the president of MAYB, which he started in 1993. "We wanted to offer the kids of Kansas a chance to play more basketball in the off-season. We found a need and filled it. "We worked very hard to put teams together and run the first tournament. Kids were looking for opportunities to play and we worked very closely with school coaches to help form teams. Those were the days when the three-player-from-a-school-team rules were in force still for the state of Kansas. Those rules were later changed so school teams could play together. "We had no idea how this could grow." Mid-America Youth Basketball would expand exponentially over the coming decade and a half. Raleigh has extended MAYB's reach across the region. By the end of 2008, MAYB will have hosted teams from 27 states and Mexico at tournaments held in 22 different states for grades 3 to 12. Brian Huxman, who works in marketing for MAYB, says the organization will field 5,000 teams in their tournaments this year, with about 1,500 of those teams hailing from Kansas. The year's basketball tournaments culminate with nationals for both boys and girls beginning on July 31. Boys nationals will be held in Wichita and El Dorado this summer, and girls nationals in Oklahoma City and Stillwater. "The Summer Kickoff tournament is our biggest single event, although nationals is catching it," says Huxman. "Our biggest explosion came simply by our use of the Internet to promote and advertise," explains Raleigh. "We are very organized and we offer a quality product for a fraction of the cost of others. We have a great staff and excellent marketing and advertising people. Our online setup is tops in the industry. We are now the second largest organization of this type in the USA and have experienced growth for 15 straight years." Raleigh did not work alone in achieving such extreme growth with MAYB. A slew of area high school coaches have been working with him from the start: Tom Haynes, Tim Swartzendruber (now the men's coach at McPherson College), Lonnie Lollar, Rick Bloomquist, Scott Burger, Don Cameron and Chris Strathman. "Those are just a few of the people who started with us and are still active coaches and working with us," says Raleigh. With thousands of teams signing up for MAYB tournaments each summer over the past 15 years, the list of marquee names among of the players to have participated is long. Raleigh was able to come up with following names from memory: the Rush kids from Kansas City, Wayne Simien, Maurice Evans, Shelden Williams and Kelenna Azubuike, all of whom play or have played in the NBA. On the girls side, Kansas greats Jackie Stiles, Kendra Wecker, Nicole Ohlde, and Laurie Koehn played MAYB. "All the girls who started for the Big 12 2007-2008 championship team from K-State played MAYB," says Raleigh. "The Colorado Hoopsters organization that was just here for the Kickoff has had at least four girls start for UConn over the years. "If they are top players from the 10-12 state area around us here, they most likely played MAYB." If tournaments like the Kickoff are hosting 700 teams, who isn't playing MAYB?