After high school, there aren’t many appealing options for young adults to play organized, competitive basketball. Triple Double Basketball gives adults ages 18 to 25 a chance to compete in an exciting environment.

The idea for Triple Double was born in the fall of 2003 when six recent high school graduates realized they no longer had an intriguing avenue to play organized basketball with people their own age. We had an idea and little else. Two of us worked at a park with a small gym in Northeast Minneapolis that we had limited access to, but it was a start.

We held countless meetings that consisted of mostly brainstorming and the collaboration of ideas. Our first objective was to come up with a realistic plan to get the league started. We didn’t have a business plan, a marketing strategy, or any long-term goals. We just wanted to play basketball competitively with people our own age. Collegiate intramurals was competitive, but it also was impersonal, informal, short-lived and unfulfilling. We wanted something with more structure.

Finding people our age interested in basketball was not difficult, but getting people to commit to idea with little credibility was. We were able to accumulate enough players to field six teams of six by pooling together friends, friends of friends and a few random players we recruited from neighborhood pickup games. We held two open gyms for players to register and for us to scout. The idea was that each one of us would man his own team.

Each player paid $40 to cover the jerseys (T-shirts) and other miscellaneous costs. By the end of the 20-game regular season each team had eight players on its roster.

Since then, the league has completed six successful seasons and has grown in participants and maturity. We have developed a diverse basketball community for young people who are still transitioning to adulthood and aren’t ready to let the game go.