About

I grew up in West Jefferson, North Carolina. Oldest of four. Small town in the Appalachian foothills. No AAU, no rec center, no YMCA, no training. Just a hoop in the backyard, on a grassy hill, and a lot of time.

When I was 10, doctors told me I had lupus. It took them over two months of testing to land on that. They were wrong. I figured that out 30 years later. In between, I had three lymph nodes removed from my neck, a kidney biopsy, and a bone marrow biopsy. I was a research project. I took prednisone and gained weight. I got tired in PE. I missed the part of childhood where you find out what kind of athlete you are.

I went to a doctor for the first time in 30 years a while back, just to check in. She talked to me for five minutes and said I bet you had mono and I can prove it. One blood test. She was right.

I don't know what I would have been as a player. I don't think about it much. It is what it is.

Basketball found me

Nobody coached me. A relative told me to make sure I could dribble with both hands. That was about it. I rebounded my own shots in the backyard for hours, on a hill in the grass. At my grandparents' house, it was flat, on gravel. I wasn't training. I didn't know that was a thing. I was just having fun.

I watched Dean Smith. I didn't read his books until later, after I started coaching. As a kid I just liked the team. I didn't know other levels of basketball existed besides UNC and the ACC. I didn't have favorite players. I loved the team and the man who led it.

I got cut my freshman year of high school. Almost passed out in tryouts. Made the team every year after that and contributed, but I was never the star. Nobody outworked me.

Chapel Hill

I went to UNC for math on a full academic scholarship. I lost it. I was good at math in high school, but I shouldn't have majored in it. I didn't know I could switch. I just didn't know. Self-aware about most things, but I didn't know college worked like that.

I tried out for the JV team. Couldn't miss in warmups — one of the managers even said something. Got exposed as soon as the games started. The gap was too big. I never tried out again.

I spent too much time in the gym. Woolen and Fetzer, hours on end. If people were playing, I played. If they weren't, I shot. I lifted. I tried things. Nobody was watching.

I never drank. I didn't party. I worked at my job on campus and I played basketball. That was the whole life and I was happy.

Right after graduation I was still working on campus and I saw a team practicing one afternoon. I didn't know it was a team. They asked me to practice with them. A few weeks later they asked me to coach them — the previous coach had quit. That's when it started. I was the head coach of the UNC women's club team for the next four years and I never looked back.

Two tracks at once

For about a decade I had two careers. I built things at universities — classroom technology infrastructure, networks, support systems. At NC State I founded a unit from scratch as the only employee and built it into one of the most critical operations on campus. Eleven full-time employees, 55 total staff including the 11, 85 multimedia classrooms, multiple project budgets over $150K, total budgets over $1M. I was good at it because I worked all the time.

I drove from Raleigh to Chapel Hill constantly to coach the women's club team. I sent work emails at midnight. I took vacation days to work basketball camps. I didn't take real vacations. I didn't see it as balance. I just did the work.

The tech career was real and I cared about it. But coaching was the thing.

Going all in on coaching

I left NC State and took a massive pay cut to go to Coker as an assistant. Lived in a hole in the wall in Hartsville to save money. Worked too much — I was part time, but I put in 40+ hours a week — and got fired for it. They paid me to leave so I "wouldn't get them in trouble." I had a great time there until that day.

From there I went to Apprentice School as a volunteer assistant. The head coach knew me from working camps. I started teaching math as adjunct faculty to pay rent — algebra through calculus, plus tutoring. Eventually I ran their IT too. Then I became Associate Head Coach and Offensive Coordinator. We went 56-26 over my three seasons as OC. Across my full tenure at Apprentice, we finished top 10 nationally four times, top five three times, and developed ten USCAA All-Americans. I served as interim head coach.

I kept coaching at the college level for the next decade. UNC Asheville, Presbyterian, Combine Academy, Johnson & Wales. At Johnson & Wales we won a national championship and went to the USCAA Final Four. I coached All-Americans, recruited internationally, ran programs.

I also learned how college coaching actually works. The politics. How some coaches treat people. How some "famous" ones aren't who their reputations say they are. Not all of them. But enough.

Kristin

I met Kristin in 2013 at a recruiting and coaching conference. We got married in 2014.

She was a highly recruited player out of high school — sixteen D1 scholarship offers. She had bad experiences as a player. She got into coaching after she finished, and she knew the business side of college basketball cold. Things I hadn't seen yet, even after years in it.

She is also the reason I eventually left college coaching to chase Hoops College full time. I never saw myself as entrepreneurial. But here we are.

Why Hoops College exists

I started Hoops College in 2010 while I was still at Apprentice School. We were on the bus after a bad game, and I was trying to figure out why we were struggling. The conclusion I came to was that our players had never been taught the game from a young age. They had been moved through a system that produced participation but not skill. I thought I could do it differently. So I started running small camps on the side.

I didn't push it hard at first. I had a team, and that came first.

Combine Academy showed me something I needed to see. I was Executive Director of the women's basketball program. The marketing was good. The branding was good. The packaging looked elite. And it didn't mean anything, because there was no accountability at the top and no real interest in what was best for the athletes. The polished version of youth basketball, from the inside, was hollow.

That's when I knew Hoops College had to be the real thing. Not a brand. A program. Stage-based development. Accountability. A system that actually produces players, taught by people who care about kids more than they care about the next tournament check.

I spent the next several years developing the coursework. I left college coaching in 2019 and started training. The work was small at first. I answered a Thumbtack post. Word of mouth did the rest. Most of the first families were from the Indian community in Charlotte. The kids were beginners — many had never picked up a ball. A few of them are still with us seven years later. One is a sixth grader playing on a high school JV team.

In spring of 2020 we closed the facility for three or four months. Kristin and I worked warehouse jobs at Amazon to pay the bills. We kept paying rent on the gym the whole time. We didn't want to lose what we'd built. We reopened the same facility that summer.

I've placed more than 50 athletes into college basketball programs in the US and internationally. I run daily skill development sessions with players from age four through professionals. I do the strength and conditioning. I break down film. I run the shooting machine. I take every phone call from a new family. I mop the floors and clean the bathrooms.

Since 2020 I've designed and built four basketball facilities from scratch — close to 14,000 square feet total. I designed and built the Hoops College website. It got hacked more than once on WordPress. I finally decided to run the server myself so I could lock it down. I built that too. I produce hours of free audio and video. I write. The blog has hundreds of entries.

The point is: I do the work. I always have.

What I'm doing now

I'm working on a permanent training facility in Charlotte — a 150×80 warehouse I'm in the middle of negotiating for. It would be the home Hoops College has needed for years. I'm developing a basketball shooting analysis app that uses computer vision to give players real feedback. I'm writing more.

More on that on the now page.

Why I keep doing this

Coaching wasn't a plan. It found me when I was working an IT job on a campus where I'd just spent four years figuring out how to be alright. I never expected basketball to be my career, and I'm self-aware enough to know I wasn't built to be a great player. That's fine. It worked out the way it worked out.

What I'm built for is this: teaching people how to get better, building the systems that let them, and being honest about all of it.

That's the whole thing.

— Aram