Team SCAN has risen from almost nowhere to become a national powerhouse and arguably the top AAU boys basketball program in New York City.
Their three age groups – 16U, 15U and 14U – are all ranked in the top seven in the country by Five-Star Basketball. The 16s, led by top-10 national recruit Chris McCullough, a Bronx native who plays at The Salisbury School (Conn.), Cardinal Hayes’ Shavar Newkirk and Conrad Chambers of Friends Central (Pa.), are ranked No. 1.
Team SCAN, though, is just one part of SCAN NY, an inner-city youth organization based in The Bronx and Harlem that services 5,000 children from across the city and emphasizes academics and community service. The basketball teams practice at Mullaly Recreation Center in the shadow of Yankee Stadium.
Below, Team SCAN director and SCAN Mullaly Academy head Terrence (Munch) Williams, a product of the program himself, discusses with NYPost.com’s Marc Raimondi everything from building up the program from just a single sixth-grade team to how SCAN does it without a sneaker sponsorship.
Marc Raimondi: When you’re out on the road, do you ever have people ask, “Where did you guys come from?” You always hear about Gauchos, New Heights, Metrohawks and others. Now in the last two or three years it’s been Team SCAN among those.
Munch Williams: A lot of times they ask where we’re from as far as location. Then once you say The Bronx, then it turns into, “well how close are you to the Gauchos?” Then you explain that it’s pretty much like a Duke-North Carolina situation. For us, it’s more how stable are you guys going to be? When they ask where did you come from, it’s more like “how long are you going to be around?” Are you just another fly-by-night AAU program?
I think it’s more accessible to the general public now, because we have high school teams. A couple of years ago, it was just middle school. Now it’s more accessible with Facebook, Twitter, websites, recruiting services. It’s definitely an interesting dynamic to go from who are you, where did you come from and you honestly might be the best team in New York. That’s like three things going on at once.
MR: This has pretty much just been in the last three years or so?
MW: Basically it’s been a three-year process. It’s been a lot of work in those three years.
MR: When did you realize, wow Team SCAN is a national program? When did you say to yourself, yeah this is actually happening?
MW: I think when the 10th graders now were in eighth grade and they did really well at AAU Nationals. The current ninth-grade team went to nationals last year and came in 10th. You put those units together and start traveling to further places and you’re still successful, it makes you feel like this is not just a local thing, not just a regional thing. It’s more of a national thing. I would say a year and a half ago it happened.
MR: When will you guys hook on with a sponsor, do you think?
MW: We are hoping that we walk through that journey next year. We’re definitely going to be sitting down with a few companies in August and September and discuss some future plans. Just try to make a decision as far as the program is concered for longevity. It doesn’t have to be Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, whoever, to be a comfort zone for us. We still want to be able to select the student-athletes we want. We still want to uphold our standards: academics first, community second and basketball third. We don’t want to have to take any kids who don’t fit with what we believe in. Whichever sneaker endorsement deal really understands that and embraces it, that’s who we’ll probably end up with.
MR: Have you been approached by companies?
MW: I think we’re in a good space. I think the key is to have the kids continue to stay academically sound and on course to qualify – every kid in our program. As long as we continue to run a program that’s self sufficient – not needing a sneaker deal – I think we’ll be able to get something that’ll be productive for everyone.
MR: How do you balance that emphasis on academics and being a national-level program?
MW: I think it goes back to your roots and understanding how you got to this point. You have to believe that all the stuff you do off the court prepares you to be successful on the court. So when you stop doing those things, you might stop having success on the court. The kids have to believe that not only are we competing at the highest level basketball wise, but what separates us from everyone else is the fact that we do take the academics serious. We’re not ashamed to say in the summer we’ll have an SAT class that goes for about an hour and a half and everyone is in it. It’s making sure the standards stay the same for everyone across the board – whether that’s an eighth grader or a 10th grader, whether you’re the No. 10 kid in the country or not ranked.
Everyone has to understand your academics have to be sound. You have to make examples out of kids when those situations arise. You have to have a backbone as a staff. When you give kids accountability, they rise to the occasion, because they want to play. If I don’t do well in school, you’re not going to go to Las Vegas. Every kid wants to go to Las Vegas.
MR: A lot of people don’t really know that this has been a growing process. You’ve had your oldest group since sixth grade. Most programs don’t have that. Kids come and go. This has been the same group of kids.
MW: It’s definitely like a family. A lot of AAU programs recruit from the top and work their way down. We recruit younger so we can develop them into the players that we think they can be. We spend countless time when they’re younger rather than hope this kid will come to me when he’s in 11th grade and hope he’s good. When he’s in seventh grade, he wants to learn. He’s an open book.
MR: The basketball part of SCAN is just a small part of the program. You’re making headlines because of basketball now, but that’s not where this whole thing came from.
MW: We put 75 percent of our energy into academics, social networking, community service, social skills, high school assistance, college assistance. All of those things that no one else wants to do, we put 75 percent of our energy into that and 25 percent into basketball. If you can compete with programs that put 75 percent into basketball and 25 percent into something else, you’re automatically going to win. It’s definitely a program that stands strong on basketball not being the main focus. It’s reiterated on a regular basis.
Winning games is the easiest thing compared to educating a kid and teaching a kid how to become a man. That’s a long life process. I think our competitors don’t want to do that.
MR: Has it been hard without any kind of sponsorship?
MW: Financially, it’s been difficult. As a program, we want to deal with the kid holistically. It doesn’t stop at, oh we’re going to this tournament. It’s also, well how does that kid get home or you want to make sure you’re eating properly. You don’t want to just feed kids McDonald’s three meals a day. You want to eat well. You don’t want them to sleep on top of each other in hotel rooms. I think it hasn’t stopped us from capturing our miniature goals, but I think as we get older it’s getting more expensive. And at the rate we’re growing, there are more and more kids who want to come in. How do you add that without the sneaker endorsement? And if you take the sneaker endorsement, how do you have that without selling your soul for what you really believe in?
I don’t think any teams we play when we leave New York has less than a $70,000 budget. And we’re dealing with candy money. It’s all the things you do before the game. In these elite tournaments, you want to make sure you’re prepared to the best of your ability, which means you have to go to sleep on time. You have to wake up on time, eat the proper breakfast before you play a game. How many games can a kid’s body take when you’re eating a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin. The bigger your budget is, the better your kids will eat, the better they might perform.
MR: Has it been a tug of war with expanding and your budget and your academic standards?
MW: When we started, we had the reputation of “the academic place” or “the smart kids.” When you come here, you know what the expectation is. That’s not the issue. The issue is how do you continue to evolve into a national program year in and year out without losing that mom and pop situation, without knowing every kid individually. The scariest thing is you have 15 teams and you don’t know any of those kids’ names. Me as a director, I pride myself on knowing kids’ first and last names, what high school they go to, what’s their high school coach’s name, what’s their mom and pop’s name. I think the best thing for us right now is to probably add one team per year and that team be a seventh or eighth grade, so you can really work with those guys – and it’s better for your budget.
MR: What else do think is different about SCAN than other programs?
MW: It’s an honor to work with coaches and other adults who are like family. I think the thing that separates us is that everyone that’s in our umbrella that coaches are actually friends. These are the people you invite to your wedding, your baby shower. Oswald Cross, he’s like a brother. Jason Forde, I went to college with him. Justin Weir, I went to college with him. Jamaal Womack, he played for Oz. David Gates, he was with me when we had one team here, selling candy.
What people don’t understand, one of the reasons I won’t leave, is because it’s not just about whether we’re winning or losing. When you lose, these people treat you the same way. One of those things people don’t know is that our coaches don’t get paid. Even me. None of our coaches make a profit. At SCAN, we don’t make anything – literally zero. We’re really doing this to help other people’s kids. Everything we do is secondary to our actual job. That’s our leisure time.
This is a program I truly believe in and understand the mission. In other places, you can’t have joy in the game of basketball, because it’s so political. At SCAN, there’s no politics. There’s no pressure, winning or losing.
MR: What are your goals as a program?
MW: I think when we’re done, whether that’s three years or five years or 10 years from now, when SCAN has walked away, there’s going to be a transition in the AAU basketball world. People are going to say, we need to follow their blueprint. It can’t just be, I’m going to get the top kid and I’m going to put him on a team with six other top kids and hope to win. What we’re doing is showing you our method in theory, it works and it starts from development. When we finish, I want people to have to do things different or your program is not going to be successful. And you need to look in the mirror and say, dag why are we not successful? Some of those attributes are going to pop up in your head and you’re going to say Team SCAN does it this way, I’m not going to take everything from them, but I know a couple elements they did that were successful. And that’s without a deal.
MR: What makes you emphasize sending kids to academic prep schools out of New York City?
MW: I’ve seen both sides. I’ve seen the local public school side and the distant boarding school. I went to Taft [and then The Holderness School (N.H.)]. I think the biggest thing for me, whether it’s a boarding school or Catholic school or private school, it’s a safe haven. You have to have somewhere safe and consistent in a small learning environment. The schools that we help select for the kids, their focus is on 24-hour-a-day learning and challenging yourself and being in an environment that’s competitive in the classroom as opposed to just being competitive on the basketball court. The schedule we have in AAU takes care of your competitiveness with basketball. To get a kid that’s competitive in the classroom, that’s the next level. There aren’t many kids around that are like, I’m super competitive in the classroom and I’m super competitive on the court. Nine out of 10 times, you find that person and they’re successful in life.