Hoop dreams

Westchester County Business Journal, Jun 2, 2008 by Golden, John

The business enterprise is a legend in its field, though the small and sparsely furnished office suite it occupies at Briarcliff Corporate Campus does not at first suggest that. The temporary nameplate on the door reads, "Five-Star Basketball." It belies the luster of the company's summer camps, whose roster of alumni includes some 360 past and present National Basketball Association players taught by coaches who became some of the most successful in both the collegiate and professional ranks.

"It was in my basement in Yonkers for the first 20 years," company co-founder Will Klein said at Five-SW Basketball's roughly 900-square-foot headquarters in Briarcliff Manor. The company later rented a storefront on Kimball Avenue and moved again in Yonkers to Nepperhan Avenue before Klein's 40-year-old son, company co-owner and President Leigh A. Klein, relocated the business closer to his Briarcliff Manor home. The elder Klein, though, still makes room in his Yonkers garage for Five-Star camp supplies and instructional products.

White-haired and wearing a workman's navy-blue shirt and slacks, Klein at 75 is still in the game after 42 years, though the game in which his company competes has changed. The business of summer basketball camps for high school players has gone corporate, dominated now by the prominent logos of the likes of Nike, Adidas and Reebok.

In the late '80s and early '90s, those corporations put a full-court press on the summer- basketball market and "started spending a lot of money in getting the top high school players in the brand," Leigh Klein said. "Other camps started to aggressively use high school basketball for product placement." It is more about branding and big money now, he said, than about teaching kids how to raise their game on the court and in the process prepare them for life's successes and failures.

A former principal and coach in the New York City school system, Will Klein is an old-school educator. Guided by his son, Five-Star Basketball has managed to adapt and survive among the well-heeled sneaker giants, tournament-sponsoring rivals such as Hoop Mountain and The Hoop Group Inc., and the summer Amateur Athletic Union tournaments that draw top players and college recruiters and have made high school basketball a year-round spoil.. Since the mid-'90s, Five-Star has teamed up with more than 20 corporate sponsors and partners, including The Coca Cola Co., whose PowerAde is the exclusive beverage of Five-Star events; Anaconda Sports, whose The Rock is the camps' exclusive basketball; Slam Magazine, Five-Star's official media partner; Grade Check, its official academic counsel; Xubi, maker of custom team uniforms; All Worldwide Travel, Five- Stars official travel-agency partner; and Prep Champs, its exclusive recruiting partner.

While forging strategic partnerships, the company continues to stress its educational mission as a place where both young players and coaches attending Five-Star academies can learn the game. That's a harder sell these days.

"Every year there are less and less camps," said Leigh Klein. "It's a tough business. It's not like anything else." With coaches, counselors, medical staff' and medical and liability insurance, "Five-Star is an expensive ramp to run, more so than other camps" many of which are shorter in length than Five-Staffs traditional five-day camps.

Leigh Klein expects the company, which has six full-time staff, to gross about $3 million in revenue this year while employing about 600 part-time workers at leased regional camps around the country that draw male and female athletes from "just about every state and probably 15 to 20 foreign countries. From June 7 to Aug. 31, we'll fill 1,000 coaching jobs" at more than 40 Five-Star events, he said. Over the course of the summer, well reach 13.000 to 15,000 kids in some sort of Five-Star way."

Will Klein started the business in 1966 at a girls' summer camp in the Albany area with former Long Island University coach Roy Rubin and Howard Garfinkel, now retired. A colorful New York City scout of high-school basketball talent who published the High School Basketball Index, Garfinkel recruited metropolitan area high school coaches to assist at their start-up camp. Among them was Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Hubie Brown, then a coach at Fairlawn High School in New Jersey. Of the 62 players at that first camp, 24 came from Brown's school, he recalled with a laugh.

Two in that first group of campers went on to play in the National Basketball Association. The stars who followed in the Five-Star program included Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Moses Malone. Stephon Marbury, Isiah Thomas, Dwayne Wade, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul. Other Five-Star campers have gone on to star in and on other fields, such as New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez and Oscar-winning actor Benicio del Toro.

Jordan, the first inductee in the Five-Star Hall of Fame, "credits the camp with his success in basketball," Will Klein said. In the spartan Briarcliff office, a framed photo of Jordan with Duke Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski and Leigh Klein during Jordan's return visit to a Five-Star camp suggests the company's stature in basketball circles.