Where it all began
Oklahoma freshman phenom Trae Young’s success on the basketball court can be traced back to years of hard work at the Cleveland County Family YMCA.
KANSAS CITY, MO. — Sometimes before home games, Trae Young will take a drive.
Sometimes, Young’s drive takes him down Stubbeman Avenue, past Norman North High School, where he starred for the Timberwolves and became a state-wide sensation before becoming a national sensation with a record-setting freshman season.
More often, though, his drives take him less than two miles away, up Flood Avenue and west on Lexington Avenue.
There sits the Cleveland County Family YMCA — the gym that built Trae Young the basketball player.
“We had a little goal in our front yard he would shoot on, but we lived at the YMCA,” Rayford Young, Trae’s father, said. “Early morning workouts when he’s swimming and we’re lifting weights and just in the gym — I can’t even tell you how big that was. Playing against the older, grown men at the Y, all that stuff was just really cool and I think it’s helped him get to where he is now.”
There won't be any such drive Wednesday before the Sooners open the Big 12 Tournament against Oklahoma State at the Sprint Center (6 p.m., ESPNU), but the YMCA won't be far from Young's mind.
Young started going to the Y when he was about 5 years old, first watching his father — a former Texas Tech star — play pickup games and later entering those games himself.
About the time Young was in seventh or eighth grade, he decided it was time for him to enter those pickup games, stepping onto the court with players much older, some as old as Rayford.
He was tentative at first, but gradually gained more status in the group of men and boys.
Jon Arvin from Moore went to the Y nearly every day after his junior high and then high school practices.
He was surprised when Young first asked into a full-court pickup game.
“Who is this young kid? Shouldn’t he go play with the young guys?” Arvin remembers thinking. Then the game started. “I didn’t think he could hold his own,” said Arvin, who is four years older than Trae. “Next thing you know, he would pull up from 26 feet and hit only net. Then he would pull up deep again. He was never gun shy.” Sound familiar? Kyle Whitson, 23, remembers seeing Young at the Y for the first time in 2014.
Most of the time, he saw Trae and Rayford going through drills but later, Young joined a game Whitson was playing.
“He would seriously pull up from just above half court and drill it,” Whitson said. “Guys that were 21, 22 years old would talk to him and try to guard him when he was 15 or 16 years old and it was no match.
“They knew who he was and how old he was, but they thought they could guard him . ... It wasn’t even close.”
By the time Young was a sophomore at Norman North, he had proved himself. He was picking the teams instead of being the one waiting tentatively on the sideline hoping to have someone point in his direction.
It’s “been a minute” since Young has been inside the Y, as he says, but early in the season, Trae and Rayford made a couple visits to get in shots, usually in the early morning hours.
Where Trae Young used to blend in and be just another kid getting a workout in or finding a basketball game, his anonymity has disappeared.
“It’s nuts,” Rayford said. “A lot of the kids recognize him and want to take pictures. And not even the kids — the old men that walk around the track at the top and even the employees at the Y. It’s pretty cool being a local kid and being able to give back in that way.”
A recent Uber commercial featuring superstars LeBron James and Kevin Durant riding around with host Cari Champion to some of the places that shaped James as a young player — most notably Summit Lake Community Center in Akron, Ohio — got Trae Young thinking more about the places that shaped him.
“That’s something that I would do is just go back and give back to what go me to where I am today and the Y is that place for me,” Young said. “I definitely see myself doing that.”
Whenever Young leaves for the NBA — whether it be after this season or sometime in the near future — he wants the YMCA to be one of his first charitable targets.
“It means a lot just knowing that that’s where me and my dad used to train all the time, even on snow days and different things like that,” Young said. “When I couldn’t find a gym, the YMCA is always open.”