While players were balling in NBA playoffs, these students were winning in NBA Math Hoops National Championship

While the NBA playoffs were in full swing in mid-May, the Detroit Pistons were hosting 20 students from across the country competing in the second annual NBA Math Hoops National Championship, courtesy of the NBA Math Hoops Program, Learn Fresh and NBA Cares.

On May 18, the team welcomed participants for the weekend event and competition at Little Caesars Arena. On the final day, sixth-grader Angela Montelongo and fifth-grader William Cooley, representing the Utah Jazz, were named winners in this year’s competition.

Congrats to @JazzDoingGood and the @utahjazz #MathChamps for winning the 2018 NBA Math Hoops National Championship! We’re so proud of all the competing students for their sportsmanship and enthusiasm for #MathHoops.

CC: @nbacares @Hasbro @DetroitPistons pic.twitter.com/yyNZQI9my5

— NBA Math Hoops (@NBAMathHoops) May 21, 2018

Asia Mays and Daivion Smith, the Pistons’ 2017 national championship representatives and tournament runners-up, were on hand to congratulate the new champions. Both Pistons students competed in the inaugural 2017 event, which was hosted in the Bay Area by the Golden State Warriors.

Students competed in multiple events including a Jr. NBA Clinic and a college savings session for participating parents and educators courtesy of Flagstar Bank. The University of Michigan and Wayne State ran unique sessions that connected sports and science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), while exposing the students to a collegiate academic environment.

The NBA Math Hoops Program is a board game with a built-in sports-based curriculum offered in schools in 14 states that all have NBA teams. The program is offered in communities of color for students in grades 3 through 8. Using basketball as a hook to engage participants, it helps students to improve their core math and social emotional skills while developing a passion for learning. The main goal is to help students become better prepared for high school math and STEM subjects, and ultimately lead to increased graduation rates, college attendance, and diversity in STEM-related fields. To date, more than 87,000 students have completed more than 60 million math problems through the NBA Math Hoops program. This year more than 30,000 students participated nationally.

The NBA Math Hoops calendar is broken into 12 weeks running 
parallel to the NBA season. Students spend 45-90 minutes in the program per week, for eight weeks leading up to winter break and four weeks after returning. The top student from each participating NBA team’s community is then selected to attend the national championship and compete for the title of math champion.

In weeks 1-3, students are also introduced to the game of basketball, drafting a team, and learning the game rules. Weeks 4-7 are considered the regular season, when students compete in their first games of NBA Math Hoops. During weeks 8-10, the regular season continues and students battle it out on the Math Hoops “court,” while getting a chance to rebuild their teams for a playoff run. In weeks 11-12, the Math Hoops Tournament begins, and students compete for their site’s championship title and complete requirements to qualify for the national championship. Top students from each site earn the chance to compete at the regional championship.

NBA Math Hoops is run by Learn Fresh, a nonprofit organization that “makes math fun by using the power of things kids actually care about.” Khalil Fuller, the co-founder of Learn Fresh, started tutoring kids when he was 16 years old, and realized he didn’t have any tools or resources at his disposal to make math fun and culturally relevant.

“When I was growing up here [in Los Angeles], the Lakers were just absolutely life,” Fuller said. “Kobe Bryant was a god. So I started to think, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of really cool, useful, beautiful math in the sport of basketball. What if we could just peel back one thin layer and expose that to kids. Couldn’t that be such a game changer?’

“What that looked like when I was 16 tutoring kids was like instead of Sally went to the store and bought X number of raffles, it’s Kobe’s in the gym and took X number of shots. Simple, simple stuff like that.”

During Fuller’s freshmen year at Brown University, he met some people who’d been working on the infrastructure of NBA Math Hoops — Bill Daugherty, and math teacher/curriculum writer Tim Scheidt.

“These two people were both established professionals, one of them used to work at the NBA for a long time before leaving to start a company and he was teaching entrepreneurship at a local high school, and the other was actually the inventor of this NBA Math Hoops games. He’d been in the math field for 25 years.”

Fuller wasn’t sure about his life path, but with his mentoring background, he figured working with the organization could be a great fit.

“We took this idea directly to the league, got the first-ever royalty-free license from them and this NBA Math Hoops concept was born. We work really closely with local NBA teams in school districts, after-school programs, community organizations across the country. We’re in about 30 states, reaching about 35,000 kids on a weekly basis.”

Fuller is in the middle of the transition from his role as CEO into a board member.

“In the fall, I’ll be headed to Stanford for an MBA and master’s in education to reflect, learn and chart a path of continued impact,” he said. He will be a member of the inaugural cohort of Knight-Hennessy Scholars  —  a new program at Stanford modeled after the Rhodes Scholarship.

Stepping into the role as CEO is Nick Monzi, who has been with Learn Fresh for five years as the chief operations officer.

For Monzi, it’s important that people understand that kids need to be educated.

“Fundamental math skills … It’s not the most sexy thing in the world, but it’s critical, and if you want to be a musician, or you want to be a doctor, you need to know how to do fundamental math,” Monzi said.

“Having the NBA behind us allows us to have a really key stakeholder to connect to the teams, which are now the real driving impacts. I mean, the teams are incredible supporters to the community, but financially, and just from a connecting standpoint, it also allows us to have significant credentials behind us when we’re looking at other partners to work with.”