Free Throws and High Hopes

The pursuit of a better life through basketball

STORY BY BEN KNIBBE

“I can score whenever I feel like it, really.”

Ricardo Maxwell isn’t speaking in hyperbole. He has that type of talent on the basketball floor. The junior’s highlight tape from Edmonds Community College shows Maxwell hitting three-point jumpers from behind an imaginary NBA arc with ease. It shows him driving to the lane and putting up body-contorting finishes against much bigger defenders with regularity.

“The NBA is the highest league in the world, and I think he’s got the talent to be there,” says Tony Dominguez, head men’s basketball coach at Western Washington University. Dominguez has contacted several professional scouts and says that Ricardo is going to be watched closely over his two years as a Viking.

LIFE IN THE BIG HOUSE

Maxwell spent most of his childhood in Cincinnati in a neighborhood known as Bond Hill. Until he was in high school, Maxwell lived in what his family called “The Big House,” owned by his grandparents: a three-bedroom house that was at times a place where up to 14 different members of his family called home. Without a bed of his own, Maxwell slept on the floor or a couch depending on the night.

The road he lived on, Ryland Avenue, was a backstreet and a common meet-up location for drug deals. Maxwell recalls seeing deals happen just outside his front doorstep, involving anything from marijuana to pills to heroin.

Cincinnati, among Ohio cities with populations over 100,000, has the third-highest rate of violent crime behind Cleveland and Toledo. According to the most recently released FBI data, almost one-in-100 residents reported a violent crime in 2012, not including other violent acts that went unreported.

On one occasion, Maxwell was with his mother and sister Aalaya at a laundromat when they heard gunshots down the street. It wasn’t a rare occurrence, but then they heard the shots getting louder and louder. Maxwell and Aalaya were outside loading the laundry in the car while their mother was inside the building. He remembers grabbing his sister and using his body to shield her from any stray bullets that could come their way. Fortunately, they were unharmed.

Not only is Cincinnati heavily inundated with violent crimes, but 29 percent of the population lives in poverty, almost double the national average. Maxwell fell into that 29 percent. His mother struggled to find a job that paid well enough to sustain a family of five, sometimes six, depending on whether or not his older brother was in trouble with the law.

For his first three years of high school Maxwell, along with his mother and sisters, moved into subsidized housing in the Arlington Heights neighborhood with friends of his mother’s. He attended Lockland High School, playing on the varsity basketball team for three years and averaged 16 points per game in his junior year.

Maxwell’s grades were strong and high-level basketball programs at colleges around the country were looking at him as a potential recruit. The list of schools interested included Notre Dame, the University of Oklahoma and Xavier. Xavier was coming off a berth in the Elite Eight in the NCAA Tournament: three victories away from winning the National Championship. Everything was going smoothly in Arlington Heights, until one night when everything changed. While Maxwell was lying asleep in bed the house was raided for drugs.

Jarred awake from the detonation of a flash bang grenade, the first thing that went through Maxwell’s mind was that he and his family were getting robbed. He heard loud noises, and though still disoriented, complied with commands ordering him to get down on the ground. Maxwell remembers seeing fully armed police officers asking about, and looking for, marijuana. Though they didn’t find any marijuana, the police took his mother’s friend away in handcuffs after finding money they believed to be obtained from selling the drug.

He and his family subsequently moved back to Bond Hill, but had to live in a different house because his grandparents were forced to sell the Big House. Transferring schools he attended Withrow High School for his senior year before leaving for college.

Despite the events surrounding his upbringing, Maxwell isn’t ashamed of where he is from.

“He always tells us he comes from Cincinnati,” says Western senior Mark Hopkins, a teammate and good friend of Maxwell. “He’s very proud of that.”

SWAG AND A SMILE

The many trials Maxwell has undergone haven’t changed his personality. He has swag and a smile that shines like few others. Maxwell can be heard cracking jokes, and when he is around dull moments are few and far between. His smile carries itself to the basketball court, where it becomes a physical manifestation of his supreme confidence and attitude.

His charisma and maturity, along with being one of the older players on this year’s Western Viking’s squad, made him an easy choice for Dominguez as a team captain. At 22, Maxwell is a fifth-year senior.

Hopkins has been a beneficiary of Maxwell’s leadership on multiple occasions, but one moment in particular stands out to him. Hopkins was shooting around one day after practice and was struggling to put the ball in the hoop, exclaiming, “I’m off, I can’t hit!” Maxwell then approached Hopkins to give him some advice.

“He told me, ‘You’re a shooter, don’t ever say that you can’t hit a shot, or don’t ever say that you’re off. If I miss 1,000 shots, if I miss 10 in a row, I honestly feel that the next one’s gonna go in,’” Hopkins says. It’s a mindset that takes the type of mental fortitude Maxwell has built throughout the various trials in his life.

Hopkins and Dominguez agree that Maxwell leads by example, but isn’t afraid to speak with a teammate when they are slacking off. Because of the confidence and upbeat attitude he exudes and the skill level he shows on the court, his teammates listen.

His swag and smile were never originally supposed to grace the Division-II ranks of Western. After he was forced to go to community college for two years because he didn’t have the prerequisite SAT scores to attend a four-year university, [he lit up the junior college world en route to more Division-I offers.]

Maxwell chose to attend and play at North Seattle Community College for the 2010–2011 season because he preferred the atmosphere of Washington over the life he was trying so hard to leave behind in Cincinnati. During his freshman year at North Seattle Maxwell struggled through an ankle injury. He had missed the first eight games of the season when Head Coach Kyle Gray approached him and asked if he could play through the injury, because the team really needed him to give them a boost. [Maxwell told his coach that he could, while knowing it would limit his effectiveness and hamper his recovery.] Bottles of ibuprofen later, Maxwell finished the season putting up numbers well below what he knew he was capable of. Despite the injury he still averaged almost 10 points per game, and led the team with averages of 2.9 assists and 1.2 steals.

The injury predictably worsened, and after the season Maxwell was told by a doctor that the only way it would improve was if he rested it for the entirety of the 2011–2012 season. He did, and in doing so was able to preserve a year of athletic eligibility using a medical redshirt.

After North Seattle’s basketball program was shut down following Maxwell’s redshirt year, he followed Gray to Edmonds Community College. He established himself once again as a player that had top programs calling his name, including Xavier once again, Washington State and Maryland. At Edmonds, Maxwell averaged over 20 points per game on his way to being named to the first-team Northwest Athletic Conference all-stars and first-team all-defense as well for the Southern region.

He eventually signed with the University of Maryland but was unable to attend when he found out he didn’t have enough credits to transfer, being 30 credits short of an associate degree. He then realized he had to attend a Division-II school, where he would be allowed to retain a year of eligibility by sitting out a year to fulfill the requirements for an Associate’s. Maxwell was released from his Letter of Intent to Maryland and followed through on a promise he made to Coach Dominguez that if he wasn’t able to go play Division-I basketball he would play at Western, an annual contender for Division-II National Championships.

With Maxwell leading the way, Western has been voted into first place in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference preseason coaches’ poll for the first time in eight seasons, which includes the National Championship squad of 2011–2012.

His goals for the season show he isn’t going to shy away from those opportunities and expectations. He plans on winning the GNAC player of the year award in both of his seasons here, along with first team all-defense. Above all individual accomplishments and accolades, his biggest goal is to win national championships.

Coach Dominguez says that to compete at the level Western does in Division-II, a team needs Division-I-level talent. Maxwell is very much that ability. “He has the talent to do whatever we need him to do,” Dominguez says. “There will be nights when he scores, nights when he passes, plays defense: we’re gonna ask him to do everything.”

A BROTHER’S BAD EXAMPLE

Maxwell never knew anything about his father until he was 18 years old. With him out of the picture for his entire childhood, Maxwell felt he had to grow up quickly and assume the role of man of the household to his three younger sisters.

He also has an older half-brother, John Brown, who showed just as much promise on the basketball court as Maxwell. As a sixteen-year-old freshman in 2002, Brown led George Junior Republic (Pa.)ith 15 points and 10 rebounds in an overtime victory against St. Vincent-St. Mary High School (Ohio), a team led by LeBron James.

Brown’s issues weren’t on the court, but off. The off-court problems were the reason he was at George Junior Republic, an all-boys nonprofit institution for troubled youth.

George Junior Republic being located in Pennsylvania helped Brown, but when he was back in Bond Hill he was mixed up in all of the things that Maxwell wanted to stay out of. He believes seeing where his brother ended up (currently in prison) after going through a lifestyle filled with violence and drugs helped to keep him off that path.

For him there were only two options, Maxwell says. “You could go to the gym, go to school every day, or get with the wrong crowd and get with the guns and the drugs … I had to take the other way.”

He saw the path his brother took, and knew that wasn’t going to be the life he wanted to lead.

“My heart, my mom, she told me she didn’t want me in that lifestyle. So I took the other way and was like, ‘I’m gonna get us out playing basketball,’” Maxwell says. He frequently was faced with the temptation though. “I had times where I thought ‘man, easy money, my family needs easy money.’”

Maxwell knew his brother took the “easy money” route because he felt there was no other option. He knew his aunts, uncles and cousins took the route of “easy money” because they felt there was no other option. He was determined not to do the same. He didn’t want his sisters to look at him the same way he looked at his older brother. He wanted to set an example for them to want to go to college.

BECOMING A MAN

The best way he knew to stay out of that lifestyle was to stay focused on athletics. As soon as school was released for the day he went to practice for whatever sport was in season, whether it was football, basketball or baseball. Then, after practice, he would go to his basketball hoop by his house and practice more.

The rim was bent down, the backboard was shattered out. The base of the hoop, intended to hold water or sand to keep it in place, was broken and could hold no water. To keep the basket from toppling over, Maxwell found bricks and other heavy objects to put them on the base of the hoop. Every time he wanted to play, he had to move all of the bricks off of the base of the hoop just to move it.

That hoop is where he could block out all of the other noise that was going on around him. He could forget growing up without a father. He could stop wondering where his brother was. He could zone out of the world around him and focus on what was under his control: basketball. That busted up hoop is where Maxwell says he grew up and became a man.