Hoops on the River turns Vancouver’s core into basketball festival

What: Hoops on the River, a huge three-on-three basketball tournament with other activities for kids and families.

When: 4 p.m. Aug. 14, free kids’ clinics begin; 8 p.m. Aug. 14, King of the Court tournament begins; main tournament play is 8:30 a.m. until late afternoon on Aug. 15 and Aug. 16.

Where: Esther Short Park, West Eighth and Columbia streets.

Information: http://www.hoopsontheriver.org or 360-921-2429

What used to be an insiders’ gathering of incurable hoopsters on a remote edge of downtown has become a huge spectator event right in the heart of things.

Twenty-three three-on-three basketball courts will line three sides of Esther Short Park on Aug. 15 and 16 during Hoops on the River, drawing hundreds of registered teams in every imaginable category — elite players, men’s and women’s open, boys and girls at different ages, wheelchairs and Special Olympics — plus many thousands of their friends, family members and other admirers who turn up just to take in all that passionate play.

Inside the park itself, the Les Schwab center court will host special events — including an ongoing slam-dunk contest and the invitational “King of the Court” one-on-one elimination tournament, featuring what promises to be truly top-level play in an atmospheric setting.

That contest will get underway today at 8 p.m. — as a sort of appetizer for the weekend to come — and before too long the sky will be dark, stadium lights will go on and spectators be able to enjoy that “outdoor urban basketball-challenge feel,” Hoops on the River organizer Eric Anderson said. “Our goal is to see 12 to 20 of our best players really lighting things up with some good, aggressive basketball.”

Also new this year will be the cherry-picker challenge, Anderson said. Regulation height for the tournament hoops at Hoops on the River is either 8 or 10 feet, according to the age of the players, but this hoop will be perched at an altitude of 25 feet. It’ll cost a couple of bucks to take a shot; if you are an adult and you score, your name will be entered into a winnowing-down process of random drawings and dice-rolling, with the final prize being a brand-new car from Dick Hannah Dealerships.

And if you’re entering first through sixth grades, there’s a round of free afternoon-into-evening kids’ basketball clinics today, run by local business Shoot 360.

Anderson described these clinics as “hourlong, high-tech, skills-and-drills time” — with a free slice of pizza for every participant and the Trail Blazers mascot, Blaze the Trail Cat, on hand as well.

Clinics are free but registration is required; parents should call 360-921-2429 to sign kids up.

One Team

Street-level mass-participation hoops tournaments seem to be everywhere these days, Anderson said recently from Lincoln City, Ore., where he’d gone for a family outing — and where a huge Hoops at the Beach event was underway, he said. And then there’s Spokane, he added, which “holds the largest three-on-three tournament in the world. It draws a ridiculous number of people and the economic impact to Spokane is in the multimillions.”

Vancouver’s own Hoops on the River was started in 2006 as a fundraiser by and for Share, the nonprofit agency that houses the homeless and feeds the hungry. It was held at Vancouver Landing, a riverside spot just west of the Red Lion Hotel at the Quay.

But the event became a victim of its own success, Anderson said: “It grew and grew for years. Eventually it turned into this thing that became a little problematic for Share. They didn’t have the resources to run it.”

When Share announced that it was reconsidering the whole thing, Anderson and his business partner, James Welch, eagerly took it on. They worked out an agreement to continue sharing any profits with Share for two years — after which the money would come to their own nonprofit foundation, called One Team Kids.

“Our mission is to generate scholarship funds for kids who want to be able to participate in sports or after-school activities but don’t have the means,” he said. It’s still pretty new, he added.

One Team also decided to sacrifice the accuracy of the name and move the basketball extravaganza off the waterfront and into high-visibility Esther Short Park.

“Esther Short Park is so great … and some sponsors weren’t willing to get behind us when we were tucked away in the corner,” Anderson said.

Also, he noted, a huge redevelopment project is headed for that corner now.

“They’re going to be tearing it up and we’re going to get booted anyway in a year or two,” he said. “Ultimately our goal is to grow it back down toward the river and maybe north toward Uptown, too. Let’s saturate the whole town with basketball.”