I had just graduated high school in the summer of 2014. I was a D1 basketball commit at UNC...ok ok, wait no I wasn't. I was a biochemistry major (pre-med track) ready to enter VCU in the fall. Let me be perfectly clear when I say that I am by no means an outstanding basketball player. I'm 5'10 1/2", 150 lbs, wiry and really not all that athletic. I did not play varsity sports in high school, but I did play in a recreational basketball league. And I dared to call myself "married to the game" because I wasn't a 'player' in the social sense. In the summer of 2014 I was lucky enough to become a part of the best pick-up basketball team in northern Virginia: BRAX. Yes, the best one. Our first big game would end with me hitting a 3-pointer from the top of the arc, with a game tied at 23 to win it. This would be the first of many against our original rivals, the intramural semi-organized team from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. We would play them two more times that summer, and we would win.
BRAX was composed of members from Briar Woods High School--none of whom had ever put on a Falcons jersey to play freshman, JV, or Varsity basketball. There were a few tennis players, but that was about as athletic as we got. Every single day, for three months that summer, we would meet in the afternoons--sometimes with the temperature soaring into the 100s--and play basketball for around 3 hours. The games would be intense. There was no rivalry with any other school that we would ever go on to play that would match the rivalry we had within our own team. Every single game was hard fought, and every loss was rubbed in to the other team and every victory was cherished until the next game. I was playing with kids who I didn't even think I was friends with...kids I'd known since pre-school who I didn't think knew how to dribble a basketball. Kids who I thought were just bookworms and nothing else showed me up on the court and it was scary.
We fraternized in a way I had never imagined. There was 'beef' within the members (one kid took this other kid's girlfriend to prom once). We had a North India vs. South India game (South India won because it is best India, obviously) but everything took a backseat when someone non-BRAX tried to mess with one of ours. If you messed with one of us, you could best bet all of us would fix that problem real quick. And then it came to the end of summer, and we could ball no longer because half of us were going to all these different places to school. But then came the evolution of the social phenomenon that was...Braxchat. BRAXchat was the facebook chat that included all things BRAX. In other words, we maintained communication amongst...other things via this chat. For us college kids, BRAX was our connection back to where we had grown up. For many of us, it was the strongest connection.
BRAX branched off into many different subgroups, BRAX Elite, BRAX Elders, BRAX Ball, SOUTHBRAX, NORTHBRAX, OG Brax, True BRAX etc... just being associated with BRAX carried a certain degree of overall judgment. People knew us. Other schools wanted to play us (A group of us had gone to UVA for a friend's birthday, and we beat a UVA team 6 times in a row without having 3 of our starters). When we went to a party, everyone knew. Brax was savagery at its finest. But at the same time, we had started as a group of kids who had just played basketball together but now, were friends beyond just high school.
I guess, what this entire post comes to is--long after we're done playing basketball every single day (which I presume is a very, very, long time from now), we'll know that BRAX was probably the one of the best things to come out of high school. And a lot of people really hate us for so many reasons, but at the end of the day--Brax is Love. Ball is Life.
