Basketball Tourney Seeks To Stop Violence, Start Love

There’s a basketball tournament this Saturday at Goffe Street Park, and it’s no ordinary one. 

Along with deejays spinning lively tunes, as well as dance and drill teams adding pomp, circumstance, and style, the event will feature a kids’ free throw, layup line, and three-point contest as well as an adult dunk contest, and a host of kids’ activities like moon bounces, face painting, and a prize giveaway.

All are designed to further a goal made clear in the tournament’s name: ​“Stop the violence, start the love.”

The focus on basketball is intentional. The Stop the Violence, Start the Love ​“Legends Live Forever” tournament, which runs from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., has as its aim to honor the memory of three New Haven basketball stars: T.J. Mathis, Sean Reeves Jr., and Donnell Allick. 

At 5 foot 8, Mathis, 25, combined cat-like quickness with the hops to dunk the basketball, and had a professional career in the offing. Sean Reeves Jr., 16, was a rising basketball star at Hyde Leadership High School. Donell Allick, 31, distinguished himself on the hardwoods at Hillhouse before averaging double figures for Division I Louisiana Tech and entering the 2006 NBA draft.

All three, within a span of 70 days in the summer of 2011, were victims of gun violence in New Haven.

“This tournament honors three basketball standouts of different ages from three neighborhoods and keeps their memory alive 12 years later,” said Doc Kennedy, brother of T.J. Mathis, on a rain-splashed Tuesday evening at Goffe Street Park to rally community members to the event. 

There’s another mission, one that goes to the second part of the tournament’s name: start the love. 

“This is a positive way we can show that we are looking out for each other so we can stop losing our talented individuals and next generational leaders before their time,” said Kennedy who, together with Sean Reeves Sr., father of Sean Jr., and De’Ari Allick, brother of Donell, are hosting the event. 

Allick said he started the tournament in 2011 as part of his nonprofit Fearless Motivational Builders (FMB), which is dedicated to steering New Haveners out of trouble.

Then, on June 24, 2011, his brother Donell, a Hillhouse basketball star who played for Providence College and Louisiana Tech, was killed in the Beaver Hills neighborhood. 

“Originally, the tournament was a way to bring our community together, but when my brother died, we decided to use it as a way to honor him,” he said. 

On its 10^th anniversary — the tournament is in its 12^th year — FMB joined forces with Kennedy’s New Haven Heat Basketball Family and Reeves Sr’s youth mentoring program to amplify ​“the awareness of anti-violence with hopes of bringing our community together,” Allick said.

Kennedy said he made a promise to himself when his brother was killed. 

“I was 16 and I told myself when I got old enough that I would do something with basketball to celebrate his life,” he said of T.J. Mathis, who was not just a basketball standout at Hamden High with a staggering vertical leap, or a guard with so decorated a career at Division I Morgan State that he was on the verge of signing a professional contract. 

“T.J. was one of the most caring people around,” he said. ​“Everywhere he went, he looked out for everyone.” 

A few years after Mathis was shot to death at 25 in West Hills on Sept. 3, 2011, Kennedy got involved with the New Haven Heat Basketball Family, a nonprofit organization with a mission of using basketball to keep neighborhood kids safe. 

When Allick approached him a few years ago with the idea of bringing the New Haven Heat into the tournament, ​“I said yes with no hesitation.” 

“We are all connected,” he said. ​“Sean was my teammate and friend. Donnell was a mentor to me and played for my father’s basketball team when he was younger. This is about coming together to help push forward change.”

“We are all very close through family ties, biddy basketball, and AAU basketball,” he said. ​“My son and T.J. were training together during the mornings with my cousin that entire summer of 2011.”

Said Reeves, a long-time community advocate for gun violence prevention and founder of Motivate Kids, Inc., an organization that seeks to provide opportunities for youth and young adults in entrepreneur experience with workforce development, ​“I decided to connect with De’Ari and Doc to bring not just awareness around ending community gun violence but to also show and encourage unity in the community amongst us all.”

Another organizer, Kendrick Bracey, had a similar take. 

“We all came together to shed light on this issue knowing that we’re more powerful together,” he said, adding that he was close with all three young men.

“We’re hoping to get these kids engaged so we can curb some of the violence in our area and bring change and positivity to a lot of our youth and to the older generation as well, let them know that we just all need to come together and better our community.”

He called on ​“all the men in our community, and the women, to come out and give just a few minutes of your time.”

“If you can engage just one youngster, it just might change their day, and their life,” he said.

For information on sponsorships, donations, volunteering, and vendor opportunities, email [email protected].