This weekend’s TitleOne Tip-Off Classic to offer hoops with a cause — 16 causes, actually

IDAHO FALLS — This weekend, 16 local and regional high school basketball teams — eight boys teams and eight girls teams — will converge on Idaho Falls and the Mountain America Center to decide who is the TitleOne champion. But those teams will play for much more than just hoop superiority.

Hillcrest boys and girls, Century boys and Shelley boys will represent eastern Idaho at the first-annual TitleOne Tip-Off Classic, joining teams from across the state and one team from Wyoming. By accepting the invite, all 16 teams have earned money for a non-profit organization of their choosing.

Ryan Taylor, Hillcrest High School’s head girls basketball coach and the TitleOne tournament director, said that the tournament organizers considered awarding all the money to the winners of the two brackets but decided the schools and their communities would be better served with the money spread around.

Taylor’s team will play for the Jae Foundation, a Twin Falls-based organization focused on mental health and suicide-prevention. The Jae Foundation, according to Taylor, teaches its participants to check on those susceptible to mental health crises — what they call “boot-check moments.”

The Century High School boys team will be playing for the Idaho Port Dawg Veterans Group, a local organization founded by a former schoolmate of Diamondbacks head coach Ryan Frost.

Cody De Los Reyes, the founder, grew up in the Pocatello area and served in the military before returning to eastern Idaho.

Now, through the Idaho Port Dawg Veterans Group, Frost said, he provides local veterans with food and other services not covered by government funding.

“It just helps people that have helped our country,” Frost said of the organization. “To me, man, what a noble cause, to give money to someone who is helping veterans in our community. … We’re definitely all for stuff like that.”

The Hillcrest boys team will be playing for the United Way of Eastern Idaho, and their mission to provide clothing and food for families in need, “especially school families in District 91 and District 93,” according to head coach Mat Barber.

“We reached out to a few (organizations) that we’ve worked with in the past, and (the United Way) had a need — they were super-excited when we brought up the opportunity to play for them,” Barber said.

Each organization chosen to be represented by the 16 teams will receive a $1,000 donation directly from TitleOne. Additional funds will be allocated from the proceeds generated by the tournament, according to Taylor, meaning those donations could be significantly larger than what has already been guaranteed.

Shelley head coach Keegan Keller did not respond to EastIdahoSports.com before this story was published.

Purpose beyond the cause(s)

While the local teams are proud to play on behalf of the causes they have selected, this is still a basketball tournament featuring several teams with state championship aspirations. And all the coaches can agree that participation in the TitleOne Tip-Off Classic will help those aspirations.

“It’s always good to play in a tournament — when you play in the state tournament, you’re going to play back-to-back, it’s different from most of the things you do during the season,” Frost said. “It’s hard to replicate that if you’ve never done it. So, any time you can do that, it’s a great asset for the team.”

Century will open the tournament against the Boise Brave at 5 p.m. Thursday. Boise lost the 6A third-place game at last season’s state tournament.

That sort of competition — competitive teams not usually featured on local schedules — provide another benefit for tournaments like the TitleOne, according to Barber, whose Knights finished as the 5A runners-up last season.

Barber also explained how the different schedule, not just playing games on three straight days but the obscure tip times, will help his and other teams with championship hopes.

“You’re not playing at the traditional times — you don’t have a 7:30 tip-off for each game,” he said. “At the state tournament, one team has to play at noon every year, so if you don’t play a noon game throughout the year, that’s a little foreign to you.”

The Knights will face the Vallivue Falcons in the 8 p.m. game Thursday.

Venues like the Mountain America Center and the Ford Idaho Center, where state championship games are played, are significantly different from high school gyms.

“There’s a big difference between shooting at a high school gym and shooting in a gym like Mountain American Center, where there’s no real backdrop, similar to the Ford Center,” Barber said.

Barber, Frost and Taylor agreed that the benefits of tournaments like the TitleOne are endless. Not the least of which, according to Taylor, is the experience of playing in a gym the size of the MAC — an experience Frost said could be “nerve-wracking” for teens.

“It’s all about experiences for the kids, boys and girls,” Taylor said. “Not a lot of high school kids get the opportunity to play in a venue like the Mountain America Center.”

The Hillcrest girls’ team, riding a two-game winning streak, will open the tournament Thursday evening, playing the Twin Falls Bruins in the 6:30 p.m. game.

The tourney’s future

The long-term goal for this tournament, according to Taylor, is for it to become the “premier high school tournament in the area.” And in its first year, the TitleOne Tip-Off Classic has already caught the attention and imagination of teams across the state.

Because most teams build their schedules on a two-year cycle, he explained, many teams were locked into their schedules when tournament organizers began calling around to build a field.

Still, it wasn’t difficult to get 16 teams committed. And there is a “pretty long list” of teams that have already requested a spot in the tournament next season.

Eventually, Taylor believes, it will get to the point where there will need to be a selection process to determine which teams “get to play.” Part of the process, for the good of the competition and the teams involved, will always be a balance between local teams and those from across the state — because, as the involved coaches said, one of the purposes the tournaments serve is bringing together teams that don’t always face each other.

The games start Thursday morning, with Sandpoint and Mountain Home facing off in the girls’ bracket at 9:30 a.m..

EastIdahoSports.com is the exclusive broadcast home for the TitleOne Tip-Off Classic. You can watch all the action, all three days, through our channels. Check back Thursday morning at EastIdahoSports.com or on our public Facebook group, East Idaho News – Sports, for video links.