Your Life is Like a Basketball: Spalding Bounces Around As A Player, Fan & Coach

Jim Moelk, one of my youth group leaders and a retired Presbyterian Pastor, said, Maybe God will give basketball back to you. Jim Moelk’s words became prophetic. My dream started as I shot baskets in my driveway on a hoop my dad constructed at 165 Glenhurst Drive, then bounced its way to 112 Jay Drive in the same neighborhood as I played one-on-one with my good friend Eddie Adams, a starting shooting guard on the Penn Hills Varsity Basketball Team, and his brother Lee. The dream then bounced its way to Beulah Presbyterian Church’s gym and then on to Grove City College as I attempted to walk-on and to Cleveland’s Richfield Coliseum, Boston Garden, the Hemisfair Arena in San Antonio and to gyms and courts with Sports Ambassadors in Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and El Salvador, then with PAO in Spain and Portugal as a player, fan and coach. This book celebrates the specific ways God has fulfilled Psalms 37.4 (Delight in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart ) in my life, commemorates many special basketball anniversaries, such as basketball’s 125th birthday, the 35th anniversary of our Big Parkway East Church Basketball League, the 50th anniversary of the Pittsburgh Pipers ABA Championship, of Sports Ambassadors’ 65th anniversary, Penn Hills High School’s latest WPIAL championship; and challenges people to advance the Kingdom of God through basketball ministry, as Dr. Naismith envisioned.