Some Friendly Competiton

Dozens of players clog up the parking lot, and flood the gym every Thursday for recreational basketball. For the past couple years, players have put together teams to compete with each other. Before, the rec. league was held in Idaho Falls, but now thanks to Jacob Crawford, the league is being held in Rexburg.

“This year I got 8 teams to participate. My dad used to do it but this year I wanted to do it myself,“ Crawford said.

Creating an organized basketball league isn’t easy. Jacob walked through what he had to do to make a rec. league happen this year. In the past, he had helped his dad run a league in Idaho falls. This year however, he wanted to do it all himself. He saw what his dad had done and took those ideas and skills to make his very own league in his local city of Rexburg. He had to schedule and reserve the gym, hire and pay referees, and on top of that, he had to squeeze all the games each week into a tight timeframe. All of these add up to be a large sum of time and money. 

“You have to pay for refs and gyms weekly. It costs about 3,000 but the players each paid to be in the league to help out,” Crawford said.

With eight teams there’s naturally a lot of competitiveness. Every single game has a good amount of trash talk between players. However participants assure that the banter is healthy and competitive. 

“Competition is always a good thing, there’s competition in everything you do,” Junior player Tel Bair said. 

Overall creation of the league and the participation this year was a success. 

“It’s nice seeing all the boys have fun, and seeing all the boys that weren’t able to play basketball on the school team be able to play competitively,” Crawford said.