CJ2K league has another successful run
Anybody who happened to drive through Brady’s Run Park and onto Constitution Boulevard in New Brighton over the past two months may have noticed a lot of commotion coming from the basketball courts known as the Concrete Jungle.
With music both new and old blaring from the speakers, announcers shouting out the names of scorers over a microphone and roughly 75-100 spectators taking in the sights on any given day, the CJ2K summer basketball league returned in full force for its second season after making a big splash in its 2020 debut.
“I would say it’s bittersweet,” said league cofounder Scott Alaksin. “While we were doing it, the day-to-day grind, you look for the finish line. But now that it’s over, we’re missing the game play, the action, the kids playing on the court. I miss the entertainment and the competition, really. But it was a successful year.”
Last fall, top high school players from all over the area flocked to Beaver County to take part in the inaugural CJ2K League, an outdoor recreational league designed to help local high school players make up for the summer leagues and tournaments they missed out on due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This summer, the league almost doubled in size, with 10 teams on the boys side and eight on the girls side after featuring six boys teams and five girls teams in 2020.
A who’s- who of elite WPIAL talent took part in the 2021 season, including three of the five members of the 2021 Post-Gazette Girls Fab 5 — North Allegheny’s Lizzy Groetsch and Chartiers Valley’s Aislin Malcolm and Perri Page. Standouts on the boys side included Chartiers Valley’s Brayden Reynolds, Trinity’s Mike Dunn and New Castle’s Mike Wells and
Sheldon Cox.
For co-founders Alaksin and Joe Kirschner, what started as a spur-of-the-moment idea between a pair of longtime friends and high school basketball enthusiasts has turned into something much more impactful than they ever could have imagined.
“The way I explain it, it’s kind of like an addiction,” said Kirschner, the league’s executive director. “It’s fun. We enjoy it. Obviously we love the game of basketball. I personally love high school basketball. I had a good experience as a player. I’ve coached at the high school level for several years. There’s nothing quite like it.”
The 2021 summer season began June 7 and ran all the way up until the end of July, with a midseason all-star event on July 3 — complete with a boys all-star game, girls all-star game, a 3-point shootout for both boys and girls and an action-packed slam dunk contest. The league then crowned its boys and girls champions on Aug. 1 after a week-long playoff tournament, as the Midland Old School defeated the Hopewell Showtime in a 2-0 sweep on the boys side and
the Hopewell Lady Showtime swept the New Castle Eye of the Tiger in the girls championship.
The boys champions featured Lincoln Park’s L.A. Pratt, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart’s Dawson Summers, Rochester’s Devon Hemer and championship MVP Ryan Appleby of Greensburg Central Catholic.
“It’s a great league. A lot of great talent,” said Rochester boys basketball coach Sean Keaton, who helped guide the Showtime into the finals in the boys division. “I told them after we lost, ‘We didn’t win the championship, but hopefully we made some new connections and new friendships with guys that you might not have ever crossed paths with in this type of setting.’ Just those new relationships and those new connections is what I’m really going to take home.”
Fresh off winning back-toback WPIAL titles and the 2021 Class 6A state title, Groetsch earned championship MVP honors on the girls side after averaging a league-high 20.1 points per game during the regular season. The two-time Post-Gazette Girls Player of the Year, who will soon begin her college career at the University of Pennsylvania, said the league was a crucial way for her to stay sharp and work on her craft going into her freshman year at Penn.
“I honestly didn’t know what to expect, but it was so much fun. I’m so glad I did it. I met so many amazing people, and they do such a great job, the way the league is run,” Groetsch said. “This is the highest level of a summer league you can participate in [around here].”
Of course, most players in the league have yet to receive a college scholarship, let alone sign on to play with a Division I school. That’s why the league’s creators take so much pride in giving the players another avenue to showcase their skills to college coaches and scouts, especially after the lengthy dead period with college recruiting during the pandemic.
“That’s definitely our goal, to expose as much talent as we can, and I think we captured that this season,” Kirschner said.
Putting together a league of this magnitude doesn’t happen overnight, of course. Kirschner, Alaksin and fellow executive committee member Bryan Salada put in hours upon hours of work behind the scenes to make everything run as smoothly as possible, from having new fiberglass backboards installed at the court to setting up the official live stream for games on the CJ2K TV Youtube channel.
For the executive committee, working on ways to improve and expand the league has become a nonstop, yearround commitment. And with that kind of passion and dedication, it’s clear the CJ2K League will be a fixture in Western Pa. summer basketball for many years to come.
“Not only is it a good competition, but the way they created it, it’s just a great atmosphere and it’s just fun,” Groetsch said. “I think that’s how they’ve attracted top players. You see it, and you’re like, ‘I want to be a part of that.’ ”