![Join WSPN’s Marissa Mendoza, Edge Wheeler, Ainsley Jay, Bowen Morrison and Sofia Ciciarelli as they cover seniors’ involvement in the election and the viewpoint from a WHS educator. “[The election is] a really toxic environment,” WHS history teacher Katherine Bassen said. “It would be disingenuous for me to say, ‘oh, everything's going great.’ Obviously it's not, right?”](https://waylandstudentpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_0282-1-1200x800.jpg)
![The Boy Scouts will be selling trees on Fridays from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturdays 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sundays noon to 6 p.m. until they sell out.
“This event is one of the things that [the Boy Scouts] get to have a direct impact on the community,” freshman Alex Macleod said.](https://waylandstudentpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Screenshot-2024-12-11-at-8.38.38 AM.png)
Over the course of two months, a nonprofit organization led by juniors Will Walters, Cole Zachary and Anish Vishwanathan successfully raised over $20,000 towards the long term goal of establishing a community center near the Wayland Middle School. Named Hoops for a Home Court, the team of three partnered up to construct the missing puzzle piece of the facilities in Wayland – a public indoor basketball court.
The team’s motivation to build an indoor basketball court came from their own experiences of struggling to find places to play during the winter. Instead of complaining, however, Hoops for a Home Court decided that they wanted to do something about the lack of available indoor sports facilities.
“One of our main motivations was the fact that there weren’t any really accessible basketball courts near Wayland,” Walters said. “And so, we decided that the most fitting thing to put in a potential community center would be public, indoor basketball courts.”
The group had initially heard about a need for a public community sports center from multiple Wayland parents. With both the community in mind and a desire to give kids an opportunity that they rarely had, the three WHS juniors set out to establish a sports facility, seeking out sponsors to jump-start their journey.
“We had heard about the idea of the Wayland Community Sports Center from parents in Wayland and were told that they needed initial [funds] to pay for preliminary legal costs,” Zachary said. “So, we decided to reach out to many different local businesses in hopes of them sponsoring [us].”
After multiple weeks of reaching out to various shops and stores, Hoops for a Home Court secured sponsors from the likes of Gulf Oil, Wayland Dads, Wayland Youth Basketball, MGS Real Estate Group and William Raveis Real Estate. However, in spite of the sponsors the team received, it seemed as if they had only managed to make a small dent in the large cost of establishing a community sports center.
“We definitely underestimated how much money we’d actually need to raise for the sports center,” Vishwanathan said. “Personally, I was very pleased with the amount of money we received from sponsors, but both my partners and I realized that we had to shift our efforts into an additional method of fundraising.”
In response, the team transitioned their efforts from securing sponsors to the idea of a basketball tournament. The three partners explained that as athletes, they wanted to host an event involving sports. And because of their realization that Wayland lacked accessible indoor basketball courts, they decided upon hosting a 3-on-3 basketball tournament for kids in fourth through eighth grade.
“Another factor that motivated our decision to host a basketball tournament was the prizes we could give out,” Walters said. “We had a lot of different prizes, from Red Sox tickets to a signed Kristaps Porzingis jersey. We were also pretty smart about the way we [wanted to] give out these prizes. Obviously, the winners would receive a prize, but we created a raffle system that acted as an additional method of raising funds.”
Walters added that some of the prizes were funded by students who helped in the fundraising process. In fact, the Red Sox tickets were actually acquired through the help of other volunteers in the fundraiser.
Hoops for a Home Court hopes to take what they learned from their initial success in fundraising and expand that through other events that work toward establishing a place where Wayland residents can finally have easy access to an indoor sports center.
“We are currently in the works of possibly hosting a 5-on-5 flag football tournament in the spring and will definitely be hosting another 3-on-3 basketball tournament next year,” Zachary said.
Reflecting on their experiences hosting the basketball tournament, the team says that they would have loved to be a part of such an event when they were younger. Walters adds that he was a part of smaller basketball tournaments when he was a kid, and that his memories are ones that he’d like to replicate for others.
“As a kid, I did a couple of little [basketball] tournaments like this one,” Walters said. “It was really cool to give back and see other kids being happy for something that I created.”
