One Team, One Dream: How a nonprofit is transforming basketball in Jamaica with help from NBA star Deandre Ayton

One Team, One Dream: How a nonprofit is transforming basketball in Jamaica with help from NBA star Deandre Ayton originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

Perhaps no other basketball camp, anywhere else on planet Earth, compares to the annual PMBL Youth Basketball Camp in Treasure Beach, Jamaica.

Built on the mantra “one team, one dream,” the non-profit basketball camp parachutes into the coastal town with a mixed fleet of U.S. volunteer coaches and island natives to teach the game in a five-day camp. Now, in its twelfth year and bolstered by a new partnership with the NBA’s Deandre Ayton, the PMBL has been transformative in bringing basketball to Jamaica.

MORE:Click here to donate to the PMBL Youth Basketball Camp

Camp founder Jake Kind suggested their dedication is starting to show dividends: “We’ve witnessed big time progress when it comes to the growth of basketball in Jamaica.

Adding, “And I do believe that our camp’s persistence and dedication in Treasure Beach over the last 12 years, promoting the game at the grassroots level and nurturing all the positivity it can generate, has started to make a tangible impact.”

Big Dreams to Big Impact

The humble beginnings in 2013 started with four friends—Jake Kind, Ben Kay and James Schluchter of Philadelphia, and Zack Schwartz of Charlotte—forming a partnership with Jamaican hotelier Jason Henzell, who hosted them at his beachside Jake’s Hotel and offered free reign of Breds Treasure Beach Sports Park.

At that first camp, they turned 35 kids on the first day into 225 by the end of the week.

All it took was word of mouth that this camp was handing out free athletic gear. Thirteen years later, that foundation has remained, only with a vastly expanded scope of impact.

Now, the camp, mostly through individual donations supported by the networks of the volunteers, provides new shoes, shirts, backpacks, hygiene and school supplies for over 1,500 kids on a yearly basis.

The partnership with the Ayton Family Foundation further illustrates the camp’s influence. Established by NBA center Deandre Ayton of the Washington Wizards, the AFF supports youth initiatives in Los Angeles, The Bahamas, and Jamaica with a focus on nutrition and his mother’s belief that “feeding people is love.”

While Ayton was born in The Bahamas, his mother is Jamaican and the family maintains ties to her hometown of Cedar Springs, which is in the same parish as Treasure Beach. The AFF spearheaded the busing in of campers from those areas most impacted by Hurricane Melissa in 2025, such as Parrottee, Galleon, and Black River. Kind cited the impact of that hurricane, which devastated much of St. Elizabeth Parish last October, as a point of emphasis at camp.

“We can’t emphasize enough how grateful we are to have the AFF contributing to our camp,” said Kind. “With their local ties and everything the St. Elizabeth Parish community has been through, the Ayton family’s involvement resonates so strongly with everyone involved.”

Resilience: A Theme and a Lifestyle

Truly one of the most meaningful ways beyond basketball that PMBL has delivered for Jamaica comes in their resilience in the toughest times. Every day of camp, Coach Kind introduces a theme of the day. The theme for the first day was resilience. Kind let every camper know that just by showing up, even though many of them lost their homes in Hurricane Melissa or in Hurricane Beryl a year prior, they exuded resilience. He told the campers they were teaching the coaches about it.

In my first year as a coach, camp almost didn’t happen. Hurricane Beryl tore through Treasure Beach a month before camp and it was expected that the village and the people would need space and grace to recover. But a video circulated of Henzell asking children at Breds Sports Park how they felt about camp being cancelled. They weren’t having it. When Kind and his team saw the footage, they moved into action.

That year, the first few days on the ground were dedicated to clearing the grounds. Basketball coaches became disaster relief workers, clearing out tin scraps and wood debris from destroyed buildings, using magnetic brooms to pick up hundreds of nails in the playing fields, and rebuilding the backboards on the basketball court.

It was a Herculean feat and by the end of the week, they held a shortened camp with thousands still showing up. The next year, Breds got a facelift through a court renovation with the basketball non-profit Project Backboard, while donations filled the shipping container with 1,200 pairs of sneakers, 2,500 reversible jerseys, 3,000 pairs of shorts, 2,000 energy bars, 4,000 pairs of socks, 1,000 backpacks, 1,000 water bottles and 1,000 hats.

On an island country where there are only a handful of indoor courts, Breds has one of the best sports surfaces, its beauty elevated with art by Jamaican American Paul Anthony Smith, and extra-strength goals donated by Goalrilla that have already withstood the forces of Hurricane Melissa.

The Only Entry Fee is a Positive Attitude

As transformative as the PMBL is becoming for basketball in the country, the uniqueness of this camp lies squarely in the absence of barriers to access.

Each day, campers as young as four and as old as eighteen are free to attend with only one prerequisite: participation. The age range is far from a strict policy. (For the past three years, I’ve personally coached a group of women roughly my age (40s) and older.) Skill level is not a limitation. The coaches are just looking for campers with a willingness to learn.

For the little ones, basketball can become an afterthought, as much of the day is devoted to relay races and on Friday morning, the assembly of a giant slip-n-slide fills the valley with echoing screams of joy and laughter. As long as the children show up and give their enthusiasm to learn and play, every camper receives a free breakfast and lunch—often jerk chicken with rice and peas—prepared daily by the head chef of local restaurant Jack Sprat.

Camp concludes each year with a Friday night tournament and cookout. Under the lights, the smell of jerk chicken wafts with the sound waves of dancehall music, the rhythms of the game, and the cheers of the crowd.

The tournament is an island-wide invitation, with the youth development organization P.H.A.S.E. 1 returning hungry for a repeat title. This year, the PMBL coaches formed a team and the tournament was also privileged to the resurrection of the Rippras (a Jamaican term for stingray), a legendary traveling team on the island that played in the early 2000s. It cannot be stated enough: this camp is unique.

Even esteemed NBA referee Mark Lindsay, who’s been volunteering with the camp since 2015, led the officiating tournament’s officiating crew, delivering pro-level jump balls to start each game. With over 1,000 NBA games officiated, Lindsay has a decorated career of playoff games and career opportunities to travel the world through basketball. But when he spoke to the campers one afternoon, he gave all the glory to Treasure Beach and the PMBL camp.

“Even though this ball has taken me all around the world,” Lindsay said, “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than Treasure Beach today. Thank you.”

To help PMBL keep the camp free and provide meals, equipment and transportation to every camper, visit its donation page.

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