(Andrew Harnik/Examiner)
Antmill Project’s Clinton Crouch works to get a lay-up past Summer Heat’s Lance Murnan during Saturday’s 11th annual Hoop Dreams Tournament on Pennsylavania Avenue in downtown Washington. The tourney is the keystone event of a year-round fundraising effort to support District public high school students in their efforts to get into college.

Lauren Grover, The Examiner
2006-06-19 09:00:00.0
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More than 500 athletes participated in a 3-on-3 basketball tournament covering three blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue last weekend to celebrate the founding of Hoop Dreams Scholarship Funding, a program that 10 years ago took on the task of sending D.C. inner city youth to college.

“This is our big community festival and tournament — a gathering celebrating the other 364 days in the year that really define us as an organization,” said Susie Kay, founder of Hoop Dreams.

The nonprofit group works to raise $1.3 million from scratch each year to send 80 students to college from five inner-city schools in the east Anacostia River area.

Business and community leaders, media personalities, and professional athletes took part in the event’s celebrity game — including Brendan Haywood of the Washington Wizards and D.C. Council Member Jack Evans.

“It’s important — a great program in education,” Haywood said. “Education was stressed in my house by my mom, and I want to stress that for these kids.”

Evans announced the District’s recent donation of $500,000 to Hoop Dreams.

Scholarships are “only a small piece” of Hoop Dreams, Kay said. The majority of work and funding goes toward the yearlong college prep, including one-on-one mentorship, SAT and ACT prep, college applications, internship placement, community service and networking events.

“All of our students are African-American — and a lot of them do have significant economic and social challenges,” Kay said. “It’s great to think they’ll beat that cycle. It’s a renewed responsibility for those coming up behind them.”

Jamaal Grantham, a Hoop Dreams scholarship recipient from Ballou High School, is entering his sophomore year at University of North Carolina A & T where he studies electronics and computer technology.

“It means a lot coming from a single-parent household, to go to school and make my family better,” he said.

Grantham is one of the 90 percent of Hoop Dreams students to be the first in their family to attend college.

Hoop Dreams has helped more than 800 D.C. students to college. Nearly 200 are now college graduates, and many of those are returning to Hoop Dreams for job networking in D.C.

“It never stops,” Kay said. “At every twist and turn, so many of our kids [even after college] continue to have challenges—those realities socially and economically, they don’t go away.

“It is a pathway to education that will not only make them strong but make the whole community stronger.”

lgrover@dcexaminer.com