The Basketball Courts We Grew Up On
Before basketball became arenas, sneaker deals, and prime time, it was something smaller. More personal.
A hoop over the garage. A crooked rim at the end of a driveway. A backboard nailed to a barn. A court behind a school where the lines had nearly disappeared. A patch of asphalt in a city park where games continued until nobody could see the rim.
For a lot of people who grew up with the game, those places are basketball.
They aren't particularly important on a map. Most will never host an organized game. Some barely qualify as basketball courts at all. But they're where countless people first learned to shoot, competed against siblings, played one-on-one with their father, stayed outside until dark, or imagined taking the final shot with a championship on the line.
That's what makes them worth remembering.
At the edge of a rural field, the basketball hoop and seesaw sit beneath the setting sun.
Before There Was a Gym
Basketball doesn't require much.
A ball. A rim. Something resembling a backboard. Enough ground to take a few dribbles.
That's one of the things that has always made the game so accessible, and why basketball hoops appear in such unlikely places across America.
They stand beside barns and cornfields, behind churches, on telephone poles, in empty lots and at the ends of rural roads. Some are carefully installed. Others seem to have been assembled from whatever happened to be available.
The setting changes, but the invitation is always the same.
Pick up a ball and shoot.
The Hoop at Home
For many players, the most important basketball court they ever knew wasn't really a court.
It was the driveway.
That's where repetition happened. Ten free throws before dinner became fifty. Fifty became a hundred. Games of HORSE turned competitive. Brothers and sisters settled arguments with one-on-one. Parents rebounded while their kids shot.
The hoop became part of the house.
Years later, the house might be sold and the driveway might belong to somebody else, but people remember exactly where they stood to take those shots.
Beside a vintage car, the basketball hoop stands above a large woodpile in a working yard.
Across the open field, a lone basketball hoop stands with rock formations stretching across the horizon.
Basketball in Small-Town America
Drive through enough of America and basketball hoops begin to appear everywhere.
Small towns have their own versions of Madison Square Garden.
A faded court behind an elementary school. Two rims beside a community center. A hoop overlooking farmland. A backboard standing alone in a place where there doesn't seem to be another person for miles.
These courts aren't surrounded by thousands of spectators. Most of the time they're completely empty.
That's part of what makes them interesting.
Without players, uniforms or crowds, the hoop becomes something else. It becomes part of the landscape and a marker of the people who live there.
Beside a picnic table and rope swing, the basketball hoop stands beneath a changing sky.
Against an American flag, a worn backboard and rim stand strong as a symbol for the love of the game in America.
A weathered backboard and rim stand against a dark, changing sky.
Farm Ball
Some basketball hoops seem inseparable from where they stand.
A hoop beside a barn isn't simply a place to play basketball. It says something about the people who put it there.
Work and play occupy the same ground. Chores get finished and somebody starts shooting. A patch of dirt or concrete becomes a court because that's the space available.
There doesn't need to be a gym nearby.
There just needs to be a hoop.
Between weathered barns and a silo, a basketball hoop stands in an open patch of ground.
Inside the barn, a basketball hoop hangs above stacked hay bales where work and play share the same space.
Barn Ball — View the Fine Art Print
Every Court Has a Story
The longer you look at old basketball hoops, the more questions they create.
Who put it there?
Who played on it?
How many games happened underneath it?
Who left town and still thinks about that court?
The photographs can't answer those questions. That's part of their appeal.
An empty basketball court leaves room for the viewer's own memories.
Someone who grew up playing in Indiana may see something completely different from someone who learned the game on a playground in New York. A former player sees one thing. A coach sees another. A parent who spent years rebounding for a child sees something else entirely.
The photograph stays the same.
The story brought to it changes.
Using a railroad crossing sign as a backboard, this hoop stands in a dry landscape far from a traditional court.
After dark, basketball courts sit beneath the mountain with the surrounding lights visible beyond the fence.
American Backcourts
For more than 15 years, I've photographed basketball hoops and courts while traveling throughout the United States and beyond.
The project became American Backcourts.
It was never intended to document the best courts or the most famous places in basketball. The photographs are about the opposite: ordinary places where the game exists quietly as part of everyday life.
Some courts were found deliberately. Most weren't.
They appeared along highways, behind buildings, in neighborhoods and small towns, beside farms and in places where stopping the car seemed mandatory.
Over time, the collection became less about basketball itself and more about place, ingenuity, community and the peculiar ways people make the game their own.
American Backcourts has been featured by ESPN, NBA TV, SLAM and in fine art photography books, among others, but the subject of the photographs has remained remarkably simple.
A hoop.
A place.
And evidence that somebody, at some point, wanted to play.
A makeshift backboard and rim are attached to a wooden utility pole beside the road.
The Places We Remember
Basketball changes as people get older.
The games become less frequent. The knees hurt a little more. The driveway where you learned to shoot might not belong to your family anymore.
But certain places stay remarkably clear.
You remember the sound of the ball.
You remember where the cracks were in the pavement.
You remember the spot you weren't supposed to shoot from.
You remember playing until it was too dark to see.
Maybe that's why an old basketball hoop can carry so much weight.
It's an ordinary object capable of bringing back an entire part of someone's life.
And somewhere in America, there's probably still a ball bouncing underneath one.
The basketball hoop appears in the reflection of standing water beneath the cloudy sky.
American Backcourts Fine Art Prints
A selection of photographs from American Backcourts is available as signed fine art prints.
Created from more than 15 years of photographing basketball hoops and courts across America, the collection includes rural backboards, backyard hoops, small-town courts and other places where the game becomes part of the landscape.
Explore American Backcourts Fine Art Prints
Snow covers the ground around a weathered barn where a small basketball hoop remains in place through winter.
A folding chair faces the lone hoop across an open landscape, with no court, crowd or scoreboard in sight.