Time is a most valuable asset gifted to each generation. Through the giving of our time, we discipline, correct, motivate, teach and affect change in one’s life..Time is a most valuable asset gifted to each generation. Through the giving of our time, we discipline, correct, motivate, teach and affect change in one’s life.Time is a most valuable asset gifted to each generation. Through the giving of our time, we discipline, correct, motivate, teach and affect change in one’s life..Time is a most valuable asset gifted to each generation. Through the giving of our time, we discipline, correct, motivate, teach and affect change in one’s life...
The history of the Impact Youth League can best be described by saying, “The Life You Live, Was Not Our Own!” Life is about service to others through the giving of our time. Time is a most valuable asset gifted to each generation. Through the giving of our time, we discipline, correct, motivate, teach and affect change in one’s life...a true legacy that passes from generation to generation”.
Impact basketball has been about the giving of time. The program was birthed in 1993 by Brooklyn College graduate Ken Vickers. Vickers played for legendary coach, Mark Reiner at Brooklyn College. Reiner was named “Coach of the Year” twice during the 1970’s by the New York Public School Athletic League after two of his Canarsie High School teams in Brooklyn went undefeated, won city championships and gained the top National Ranking.
Vickers had long dreamed of playing for Coach Reiner while growing up in Brooklyn. He along with brother, Paul learned the game on the streets of Brooklyn drifting from park to park - oft times shoveling snow in the dead of winter to play. Mr. Washington, an elderly gentleman from the community began opening the gym at PS 9 for kids to play on those frigid winter nights. This made an impression on Vickers. Its something he has never forgotten. “Though Mr. Washington didn’t teach us basketball he was someone who was there for us. He gave us time with nothing to gain! No one paid, nor did he ask for anything!”
Vickers went on to become a star on the high school level and made the Honorable Mention - “All City Team.” He chose to go to Brooklyn College, and there met Coach Reiner. Reiner had a profound effect on Vickers the basketball player and the person. On the rides home, Reiner would share life experiences along with basketball nuggets. Although Vickers could play, the game did not come alive until Coach Reiner explained and disected the nuances and paralled basketball to life. He used basketball as a means of addressing life, stressing in the value of education and the need for tenacity and appropriate conduct. Reiner would often say, “You learn life through basketball.”
In 1993 when the program officially began, Coach Reiner then in retirement made a point of coming to support Vickers by making appearances and conducting free basketball clinics for the kids in the community. Although he’d passed in 1997, Vickers has often claimed that Coach Reiner’s teachings are the battery by which the Impact Youth League is run.
