Flyin’ to the Hoop
When: Friday through Monday
Where: Trent Arena, Kettering
Format: 21 games over four days featuring top area and Ohio boys basketball teams and top national talent
Top players (ESPN ranking): 1. Andrew Wiggins, Huntington (W.Va.) Prep; 3. Isaiah Austin, Grace (Texas) Prep
General admission tickets: $10 Friday; $12 other days; $40 all-tourney pass
Reserved tickets: $20 Friday; $22 other days; $80 all-tourney pass
Website: flyingtothehoop.com
The game was sold out.
Unbeaten Trotwood-Madison High School, featuring Dayton Flyers recruit Chris Wright, was playing perennial national powerhouse Oak Hill Academy — led by future NBA draft picks Brandon Jennings and Nolan Smith — in a Saturday nightcap of the 2007 Flyin’ to the Hoop tournament, then held at the Vandalia Bulter Student Activity Center.
“The place was jammed wall to wall, and the police told us we could not have any more people,” said Flyin’ president Eric Horstman. “We were turning people away, and then all of a sudden at the back door there’s this non-stop pounding. We had a young lady back there, so she finally opens the door and here’s this guy just pleading, ‘I’ve got to see this game. I don’t care what it takes!’
“Well, she’s just messin’ with him and says, ‘I am kind of hungry.’ Then she shuts the door and doesn’t think anything more about it. But several minutes later the pounding starts again.
“She opens the door and there stands the guy with a big rib dinner, complete with biscuits and a Pepsi. She was so surprised, she let him in.”
The moral of the story here is that if you feed an appetite, who knows what doors will open.
In Horstman’s case, his tournament recently was named the No. 2 basketball showcase event in the nation by CBS Sports/MaxPreps.
Played over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend and for the past few years hosted by Trent Arena, the tournament is in its 10th season. Expanded to four days this year, it opens Friday night with an anticipated matchup between Thurgood Marshall and Findlay Prep, another national power from Nevada.
In all, 36 teams from across the nation, including several from the Miami Valley, have made the field from more than 80 that tried to get in.
This year’s event, Horstman said, will showcase at least eight 5-star recruits, will likely draw up to 100 college coaches and now has a big enough crowd that last year the Dayton Montgomery County Convention and Visitors Bureau estimated the tournament pumped more than $1.7 million into the local economy.
“When you consider the economy the way it is and that this is Dayton, Ohio, in the middle of January, that’s not exactly chump change,” Horstman said.
It’s impressive enough that two years ago, the Dayton Business Journal named Horstman — who runs Sports Image, the marketing company from which Flyin’ to the Hoop has developed — one of its “Top 40 Under 40 business leaders of the Dayton community.”
Yet, as they say, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.
A couple of days ago, even though he said the teams’ flights, hotels, restaurant and ground transportation all were lined up, Hortsman tensed up every time he heard his cellphone begin to vibrate on the table in front of him.
“I always freak out when my phone starts to ring this time of year,” he admitted.
And no wonder.
Three years ago, he was shaken by last-minute calls from the teams in the tournament’s marquee matchup pitting Columbus Northland featuring Jared Sullinger, the nation’s No. 2 recruit, against San Diego High, led by No. 1 recruit Jeremy Tyler.
First Northland administrators called and said because of the cold snap that had gripped the area they feared they might not be able to play in the event. School policy said if weather canceled classes on Friday, no teams could play on the weekend.
Horstman talked to school board members for two days and finally, as attitudes and temperatures lifted, Northland was back on board.
That was the morning before the game, and then a few hours later Horstman’s phone rang again. This time it was administrators from the San Diego school, who he said informed him they had just fired their coach, who, among other things, had not bought the plane tickets for the team with the money Horstman had sent.
Horstman and his staff worked through the night to find new flights and spent several thousand dollars more to get the team to the Dayton airport 90 minutes before the tip.
“We got some hot dogs and a drink into them and they played and no one in the crowd knew what had gone on behind the scenes,” he said.
Well, actually one other guy did.
“I go into the hallway and see (Louisville coach) Rick Pitino talking to some guy,” Horstman said. “I talk to Rick and the other guy says, ‘Hey Eric, we haven’t met yet.’ It was the frickin’ head coach San Diego had just fired. All I could think of was, ‘Where’s all the money I sent you? You bought your ticket and no one else’s?’ I wanted to punch the guy right in the face. But I just let it go. I’m proud of myself for that. I acted grown up.”
‘Early mid-life crisis’
That’s the teasing knock Horstman said his wife Lori puts on him: “She said I haven’t grown up yet.”
Although he followed up graduation from Troy High — where he played baseball — with a mechanical engineering degree from Ohio Northern University and a master’s in environmental engineering from Southern Methodist University, Horstman eventually switched careers in his late 20s.
“I had an early mid-life crisis,” he laughed.
After working five years as a project manager at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Mound facility in Miamisburg, then joining a Washington, D.C., area consulting firm that had an office here, he said he found himself asking himself, ‘Is this what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life?’ ”
He said he wanted to find a way “to marry my passion for sports with a business and that’s when an ex-partner and I started our company.” He said it’s “like a professional ad agency brought down to the local level.”
The company finds national and regional sponsors that want a presence in schools and in return those schools get equipment and funds. Over the past two years, his firm has sold 17 franchises nationwide.
In 2003, the business helped launch his invitational basketball tournament. Initially he hooked up with Bobby Jacobs, an East Coast promoter who ran a similar event in Delaware. That partnership soon faltered — Jacobs spent lots of money but had little business sense — and after two years Horstman had complete ownership of Flyin’ to the Hoop.
Although crowds were modest at the onset, they soon grew and eventually the tournament moved from the SAC to Trent Arena. Now the event is close to outgrowing the Kettering arena. But Horstman said a recent NCAA edict makes places like UD Arena and the Nutter Center — college arenas — off limits to invitational prep showcases.
If fans have grown to like Flyin’ to the Hoop, the participating teams seem to love it. Teams are flown in, put up at the Marriott near UD and fed at local restaurants around town.
“One of the Findlay Prep people told me we do everything for them but wipe their noses,” Horstman laughed.
To whittle the field from the 80-plus teams who wanted entry to the 36 who made the event, Horstman said he follows a tried and true formula: “There are three criteria. Are you a marquee team like a Findlay Prep, Oak Hill or Montrose Christian? Do you have a marquee player like Grace Prep does this year with the No. 1 senior in the nation?
“And the third is the business end. If you’re an Ohio team, do you travel well? We have to pay bills and that means putting butts in seats.”
Super Bowl for some
Some of the Miami Valley teams making the field for the first time this year — Franklin, Greeneview and especially Fort Recovery — are notably excited, Horstman said:
“Fort Recovery is like 9-0 and second in the state in Division IV. They’re going up against Columbus Walnut Ridge, which is a top-10 Division I team and undefeated, so they kind of look at it as their Super Bowl.
“I got a call yesterday from them for 300 more tickets. Counting their student tickets they must have more than 600 now. When we had our November press conference, Brian Patch, their coach, said with his team in Flyin’ to the Hoop, the town was so excited that if he ran for mayor he probably could win.”
Horstman said Franklin, also unbeaten, is like a bunch of “traveling rock stars. They’re packing every gym they play in.”
Greeneview plays a top team, from Norcross, Ga., and that highlights one of the tournament’s principles, Horstman said: “We want to give local kids a chance to play on a national stage.”
Playing in front of coaches like Pitino, Kentucky’s John Calipari, Ohio State’s Thad Matta and West Virginia’s Bob Huggins has an added benefit, he said: “Middletown’s new coach is Josh Andrews. He said when he was at Princeton, as a direct result of their team playing here, two of their kids got college scholarships.”
Not only do many of the participants end up playing college ball, but 20 Flyin’ to the Hoop alumni are now on NBA rosters. In last year’s draft alone, eight former tournament players were picked by NBA teams.
“It’s become an event a lot of folks want to see,” Horstman said. “That’s why I tell anyone who asks, ‘Sure, you can get tickets at the door, but come early so you don’t run into a problem if we sell out.’ ”
With a pause, he shrugged, then smiled:
“Of course I guess you could just show up with a plate of ribs.”
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