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 dreamt 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.
One day he met Mr. Washington, an elderly gentleman from the community who began to open the gym at PS 9 for kids to come in and play on those frigid winter nights. This quietly made an impression on Vickers. Its something he never forgot. “Though Mr. Washington didn’t teach basketball, he was someone that was always there. He gave of his time with little or nothing to gain!
Vickers went on to become a star on the high school level and went on to make the “All City Team” Honorable mention team. After graduation, he chose to attend Brooklyn College, there he met Coach Reiner who - as an assistant at Kansas State, helped to make them a National Power. Shortly after, he decided to return to the city accepted the head coaching job at Brooklyn College. Reiner had a profound effect on Vickers the basketball player and the person. Reiner lived in long Island, Vickers lived in Queens. On the rides home, Reiner would share basketball nuggets as well as life experiences with his pupil.
Although Vickers was a good player, the game did not come alive until Coach Reiner explained and dissected the nuances and paralleled 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 Impact Youth 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.
