Never too late to get back in the game

Steve Bzomowski’s basketball business started with a missed shot. 

In 1991, he was an assistant coach on the men’s basketball team at Harvard University when the head coaching job opened up. He applied but didn’t get it, and started to look elsewhere. Bzomowski fielded offers from colleges in Toledo and Alabama, but his wife was set on staying in the Boston area. She suggested he offer a basic basketball skills class through the nearby Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Bzomowski thought the center, which offered a catalogue of classes ranging from Italian to poetry, wouldn’t look twice at the offering. 

“I was like, why would I do that?” Bzomowski said. “First of all, they won’t accept the idea, and secondly, no one will want to take it.”

As was often the case, according to Bzomowski, his wife was right and he was wrong. The initial eight-week basketball program sold out, as did the next session. When students in the first cohort wanted to keep going, someone suggested he rent a gym so that the students could pay him directly. It sounded like a business to him — and it has become a bigger one than he ever imagined. Never Too Late Basketball (NTL), which teaches skills to adults in a safe, community-minded environment, has operated chapters from coast to coast since its founding in 1992. Its New York chapter turns 30 this year. 

Manifesting the business 

After launching his independent business in Boston and Cambridge, Bzomowski was looking for ways to expand what was then called “Better Basketball for Everyone.” Inspired by summer camps run by college coaches, he organized a weekend adult basketball camp in Maine. But instead of targeting a particular group of students, Bzomowski advertised with flyers in delis and laundromats. When the camp sold out, it was clear there was a demand from people who weren’t reached by existing offerings. 

Around the time Bzomowski renamed the business Never Too Late, he sought ways to expand it. He sent a press release to over 100 newspapers around the New York City region and New England. After he told a reporter for Sports Illustrated magazine that he planned to expand to New York, San Francisco and Santa Barbara, people in those areas contacted him. Soon Bzomowski had built a database of about 5,000 potential participants.  

A New York chapter

Expanding to New York City always made sense to Bzomowski. A former player at Fordham University, he had longtime ties to the city and coaches based here. 

His brother, who drove a cab in New York, helped jump-start NTL’s promotion in the city, printing thousands of flyers with tear-off tabs and posting them around Wall Street, Greenwich Village, SoHo and other neighborhoods. 

There are now around six NTL clinics in New York at a time, based in Greenwich Village, Bed-Stuy and Downtown Brooklyn. 

“New York City for a long time sort of defined basketball,” he said, “and with the Knicks winning, now New Yorkers are going to argue forever that this is basketball – New York City basketball is basketball.”

Despite their championship triumph, the Knicks have done less to drive NTL enrollment in recent years than the New York Liberty of the WNBA, according to Bzomowski. Some women have joined the program after being inspired by the Liberty, he said, reflecting a broader surge of excitement around women’s professional basketball. 

Coaching the game

On a Tuesday evening in August at St. Joseph University’s Hill Center in Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, more than 30 players lined up against the gym wall, waiting for their coach to start their drills. It was their last class of the summer season. For every player with an intense expression, there was another wearing a grin. During scrimmages, even opponents clapped when the other team made a basket.

Steve Fagan is NTL’s New York City coach. He landed the job about a year after Bzomowski expanded NTL to New York City. Until then, Bzomowski had been flying back and forth between Boston and New York once a week to run classes. Bzomowski was introduced to Fagan, then an assistant coach at St. Francis College in Brooklyn who had also worked with adults at the local Y. The tryout was supposed to last three hours, but Bzomowski offered him the job after half an hour. He was a natural: His shooting form was top-notch, Bzomowski said, and his feedback to students was genuine. 

Fagan is celebrating 25 years as a coach with NTL this year across its NYC locations, where he teaches two classes a day several times a week while also coaching Division II women’s basketball at Felician University in New Jersey. The participants keep him going, he said, because they’re in NTL to get better at basketball on their own terms. 

“When you’re there for the right reason, it’s like one of those jobs that you don’t feel like you’re working,” Fagan said.

An inclusive culture on the court

Bzomowski credits NTL’s longevity to its welcoming culture. “If you’re playing streetball, it can get kind of stupidly crazy and competitive, arguing, et cetera,” Bzomowski said. “If you’re coming in with that wrong attitude, with an attitude of hypercompetitiveness, you’re going to realize right away that that’s not what goes on here.”

NTL coaches set the tone from the first day of class. They emphasize physical and emotional safety, Bzomowski said. They discourage more experienced players from offering newbies unsolicited pointers. They instead model quick check-ins around strategy during games or drills. And they encourage positive touches such as high fives, slaps on the back and picking others up when they fall on the court. 

That doesn’t mean participants don’t take the sport seriously. While the program is designed to be beginner-friendly, participants range in experience and skill level. Some are advanced but haven’t played in years and want a judgment-free zone to build basic skills. Others have barely touched a basketball in their lives. 

For many, it’s one of the few places they can have fun after work and get a second, or first, chance with basketball in their late 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond. The cost, which averages to about $30 per hour-and-a-half class, keeps it accessible for different kinds of New Yorkers. 

Participants don’t have to great basketball skills to feel good, and for some, that’s the point. Maria Diaz Gonzalez, a first-time participant in the class at St. Joseph’s, described the program as “the opportunity to be a beginner and be bad at something and keep doing it.”

Never Too Late Basketball’s fall season begins Sept. 13, with weekly practice programs on Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays across Brooklyn and Manhattan. Learn more and register here.