Hoopfest team names a chance to hype up and poke fun
Hoopfest is a celebration of many things: the competition, the crowds, the coming of another summer - and the thousands of participants often distinguished by sweet, silly or provocative team names emblazoned on jerseys ordered online or drafted on the dining room table.
Sometimes coming up with a name is simply plucking low-hanging fruit. Roughly 50 include "ball" in some form or another, from the Bible Ballers to the Ball Hogz. Another 50 teams have "hoop" in the name, such as Hoopsie Daisies, Washed Up Hoopers and at least three different variations of "Hoop There It Is."
Hoop Loops, a team comprised of four incoming high school freshmen, Sam Ploetzner, Quentin Richter, Noah Orlando and Everett Woodcock, traveled all the way from Sitka, Alaska to compete in the tournament. Playing in the high school male division, the team and their families all wore handmade shirts depicting a modified version of the Fruit Loops logo. The boys went undefeated last year and now hope to replicate that result.
For some, picking a team name is a chance to commemorate their family, as with F4, the team name of four members from two generations of the Frederick family, who've all played basketball at various times in their lives but have never come together for a Hoopfest before this year. The back of the blue tank tops they ordered online declare "DREAM TEAM" over a picture of their father - a grandfather to one of them - midsnooze.
"We've talked about doing a family team for a while," Reese Frederick said . "It was kind of last minute, but it just came together. We all play basketball, so we just thought it'd be fun to get down here and try this together."
While some team names were chosen with sentimental affection, many more are chosen on a whim.
"It came to us ... We just felt it," said Elise Davis, who is part of the "Dunk Deez Nuts" quartet with friends Sam White, Hannah Waggoner and Regan Deleuw. Playing in the adult female division, the 20-year-olds met in high school and are now back in Spokane for summer break. They dodged having to don uniforms with their team name and instead were decked out in beer T-shirts complete with nicknames, temporary tattoos and fairly large wigs.
For others, the jerseys are the end result of a series of mistakes and happenstance. Four high school friends had wanted to attend as a Looney Tunes-themed Toon Squad, only to realize someone else had gotten the name first. Practicing their ability to pivot before even hitting the court, they signed up instead as the Gooney Tunes - though Ellie Eason's father, who put in the order for custom shirts, didn't quite get the memo, so their shirts instead say "Goon Squad."
"But that's okay," Eason laughed.
Sisters Alisha and Lianna Saucedo, their cousin, Kainalu Pagente, and Michael Harwell, Alisha's husband are back at Hoopfest, participating in a decadeslong family tradition. Growing up, the sisters played in the tournament many times in various divisions, and this year are back with a new team and new name. Fans of the popular fantasy series, the " Lord of the Rings," it only seems fitting that the team would choose that as the inspiration behind their name, Lord of the Rims. They handmade matching shirts, which they tie-dyed and added the name to.
Some didn't create a unique uniform so much as adopt one, as with the seventh-graders - eighth-graders now that summer break has started, one corrected the others - who found a "rats from around the world" T-shirt on Amazon and decided to make it their Hoopfest jersey because they "call each other rat all the time." The girls all go to different middle schools but met through the Spokane Hooptown youth league.
"We just love basketball," Yolanda Deds said.
Miller Coyne's reporting is part of the Teen Journalism Institute, funded by Bank of America with support from the Innovia Foundation.
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