Confessions of an Aspiring Basketball Player

Description

Confessions of an Aspiring Basketball Player started life in 2021, just one year in to the Covid-19 pandemic that was shaking everyone’s worlds. The pandemic was leading to many UK charities cancelling of thousands of fundraising events with the consequent significant loss of income and the capacity to support the people who benefitted from their activities.

In response, the organisers of the biggest mass-participation sports events across the country created a campaign to raise funds to help save those charities. The campaign, The 2.6 Challenge, was launched on Sunday 26 April – originally planned as the date of the 40th edition of the London Marathon. From Sunday 26 April, the public was asked to carry out an activity based around the numbers 2.6 or 26 and fundraise or donate to a charity of their choice. The 2.6 Challenge was open to anyone of any age – the only requirement was that the activity had to follow the Government guidelines on exercise and social distancing.

As CEO of the UK charity, The Mighty Creatives, I recognised quickly that we were not immune to the effects the pandemic was having on our charity’s sustainability, so we set about contributing to the 2.6 Challenge in several ways. In 2021, I supported The Mighty Creatives’ 2.6 Mighty Challenge by aiming to become a champion for Basketball. This involved throwing a basketball into a hoop 26 times over 26 days as quickly as possible.

As a regular writer, I started blogging about the campaign against a backdrop of lockdowns, personal, social and economic distress and of course, some shocking mortality rates. I found myself not just blogging about the campaign but thinking harder about how the pandemic was playing out in our society and what the role of charities could be in times of civic turmoil.

I was particularly taken by the many individual stories of achievement, not least the story of Captain Tom Moore, the British Army officer and fundraiser who hit the international headlines in April 2020 when he raised money for charities in the run-up to his 100th birthday during the pandemic. And whilst that story has taken some interesting turns in recent years, it also inspired me to convert my blog into this book.

Caveat emptor: the process of blog to book has involved several flights of artistic fantasy: this book is fundamentally a work of fiction, not a manual which teaches you how to play Basketball.