Vermont Frost Heaves

I went back to Vermont this past week. Though it was technically spring there, in the Green Mountain State, spring means mud. The snow was melting, the ground was thawing, and mud was everywhere. But it was ok to be dirty because baseball was getting going, lacrosse was cranking up, the track and field athletes were sweaty but had yet to remove their sweats, the crocuses were beginning to poke their green heads up through the mud, and the sap was beginning to run (the weather was perfect for maple syruping - relatively warm days and cold nights).

It was nice to be back in the mud and nice to catch up with a passel of friends I have missed. One buddy was busy syruping, another was spreading manure on his fields (he calls his spreader the "honey wagon"), another was just back from Scotland, where he had been on sabbatical studying geology (and single malts). Another neighbor, who recently moved to Vermont from NYC, was busy running his new basketball team.

That's right, my buddy bought a hoop team. Alexander Wolff has a serious Basketball Jones. A graduate of Princeton, he knows hoop not only as a physical pursuit but also as an intellectual exercise and a game with its own social mores. Now he's learning hoop as a business.

Alex's day job is senior writer for Sports Illustrated: he has written about the Olympics, football, tennis, lacrosse, and the legendary SI cover jinx, but mostly he has written about basketball.

For the past 25 years, Alex has been to every NCAA Final Four. He co- authored the In-Your-Face-Basketball-Book, which is a hoop junkie's dream - a guide to every major playground in the United States and how the hoop is played (games to 21, 3's and 2's, call your own, winners stay, etc.) and who plays there (lawyers, women, ex-college players, frat boys, etc.)

In 2001 Alex published Big Game, Small World in which he describes rambling through 16 countries - from Poland to Bhutan - pursuing his Jones. Part pilgrimage and part meditation, the book harbingers the explosion of basketball around the globe and anticipates why the U.S. men have been relegated to the bleachers during the recent World Championships and Olympics.

Then 9/11 happened, and Alex decided to move his family out of the rat race. He bought an old farmhouse just down the road fro me and started playing ball with a rag-tag group of painters, farmers, carpenters, and professors who play noon hoop at the college.

Earlier this year, Alex bought an American Basketball Association basketball team and named it the Vermont Frost Heaves (in honor of not only the poet's shot but also the omnipresent bumps in the road that pop up all over the state as roads freeze and thaw and buckle).

The ABA has an interestingly populist business plan: a franchise costs only 20K, teams can spend no more than 120K on player payrolls, and there are a series of regional leagues which feed toward a national tournament.

But Alex's plan is bigger: he envisions a franchise for the people and by the people. The Frost Heaves will be carbon-free (i.e., they will earn energy credits that will balance their use of fossil fuels), local produce will be sold at the concession stands during games, which will be broadcast on local radio stations, and players with Vermont connections will make up the team.

In addition, Frost Heaves fans will have a say in everything from hiring a coach (which they did online last week at www.vermontfrostheaves.com) to choosing the game music. Even the ownership is a local affair: Alex's wife is the assistant general manager with full artistic control over the team's color schemes and merchandising.

In a commercial world dominated by big box stores and entertainment conglomerates, it is nice to know that there are entrepreneurs in our communities who are committed to nurturing local economies by providing a local product that engages locals. It's a healthy model, one which can all benefit all of us regardless of where we live - mud, desert, mountains, or lake.

--Steve McKibben
4/23/06