Myles was in 4th grade when he and a few buddies were playing basketball a chained up adjustable hoop in the parking lot of the Team Esface HQ on O’Keefe and Euclid in East Palo Alto. Then one day we finally asked him “Do you really love basketball?” he said something to the effect of “yes, it’s the only sport I play”. This was right after school ended so our summer camps were approaching. I gave him a flyer and told him to have his mother contact me so we can get him plugged in. Anyone with enough passion to play on a broken down hoop in a gravel parking lot is aligned with Team Esface. Couple weeks later, he’s at camp and it was clear it was a match made in heaven. The culture and community of Esface was everything Myles desired. Myles hunger and passion for the game was everything Esface desired in a player. 

The next year he tried out for a team at our evaluations and he was placed on one of our division 2 teams. At that time he was an overweight 5th grader with a lot of streetball moves but lacked the fundamentals and basketball IQ to play a more structured, organized style. The coaches had a vision for who Myles could become. Myles had a hunger and love for the game that was rare. He gravitated to every coach like a mentor and started attending training clinics and every private workout he could find. Over the next couple of years he would train with almost every coach on our staff, exposing himself to as many different styles and basketball concepts as he could handle.  He did fifteen feet in workouts with our big men specialists and even ran the track with some of our college athlete coaches training in the offseason.

His seventh-grade year he made his first Black Club team (division I) and I had the personal honor of indoctrinating him in the ways of Anti-Softness, developing a tough mindset and a comfort with physical contact. Soon after he would embark on another transformation with Coach D Mo during that summer and this pushed him into his 8th grade year with more confidence and swagger than ever. All of his training was starting to pay off, the work he had put in was translating into results. He had some of his best scoring games that year. But there was much more he would need to learn in order to transition into high school the following year. He developed the skill and his body...now it was time to transform his MIND. His highlight above shows his latest breakthrough allowing him to score over 20 points in 4 games straight so far, including a historic win against MA at their house, first time in over 10 years! To be continued…

Stay Hungry. 
Coach Dele