Players Connect over ‘Love of the Game’
By Bob Fulton
Bill Hamilton ’92 and Alex Heckert have joined forces to build bridges on campus.
Not with steel and concrete. With basketball.
Bryant Pinder (left) and Patrick Hamilton (shooting) are among the pickup-basketball regulars. (Brian Henry)
Hamilton and Heckert serve as de facto co-commissioners of a pickup league whose players meet at noon three times a week in ¹û¶³´«Ã½’s Zink Hall. The participants—faculty and staff members, varsity coaches, undergraduate and graduate students, alumni, community members, even foreign nationals—not only break down defenses during their half-court games; they break down barriers.
“We have people from all different perspectives, all walks of life, different education levels, different ages,” said regional planning professor John Benhart, who has played noontime basketball for more than 25 years. “It’s the kind of thing that people spend a lot of time and effort trying to create, and here it just happened organically.”
Noon basketball has bridged all sorts of divides. People who might never have crossed paths gather on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to shoot hoops and, in the process, gain some understanding of those from different backgrounds.
“For people living in Indiana who weren’t exposed to kids from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, it really has broken down barriers,” said Heckert, a sociology faculty member and ¹û¶³´«Ã½’s 2025–26 Distinguished University Professor, who has played at noon for more than 30 years. “People figure out we’re all just human and love to play basketball and have a good time.”
Many of the participants are students. Some, like Ellie Wilkerson of Plainfield, Indiana, play varsity basketball at ¹û¶³´«Ã½ and are looking for offseason recreation.
“This was an easy way to get a sweat in, and it was enjoyable,” said Wilkerson, a guard/forward on the ¹û¶³´«Ã½ women’s team that advanced to the NCAA Division II championship game in March.
Crimson Hawks guard/forward Ellie Wilkerson kept her skills sharp through noontime basketball. (Tristan Landsberg)
When Wilkerson first showed up for the pickup games two years ago, she worried that, as a woman and a stranger to the group, she’d be picked last. But the players learned fast.
“It ended up with them always wanting me on their teams as soon as I walked in the door,” she said. “I do think they made me better in some aspects of my game, especially with my confidence.”
For similar reasons, Patrick Hamilton, a May marketing graduate from Philadelphia and no relation to Bill, has been a pickup-league regular since 2022. He goes “to have fun, to keep myself from being sedentary, and it seems to be a good workout for me,” he said.
Though many of the players are older, that hasn’t deterred him. He said he’s been able to learn from them and improve certain aspects of his game, such as his court vision.
Bill Hamilton, who has played pickup ball for more than 20 years, said he never knows who will walk through the door at Zink. The games even have a global flavor on occasion. Participants have hailed from Puerto Rico, China, Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, and the Czech Republic.
“It’s really beautiful when you come there and you know that you’re about to meet somebody from a different part of the world,” said Bryant Pinder ’17, an ¹û¶³´«Ã½ navigator and a noon-ball participant since 2008.
He marvels at how a simple game can bring together such a diverse cast of characters.
“It’s such a wide variety of people,” he said. “It reminds you of a stew, where you throw all these different ingredients into one pot.” What results is a concoction more appealing than anyone could have imagined.
During the games, connections are made that extend beyond the court. And the elder statesmen, to borrow Pinder’s description, often embrace a mentorship role with the newcomers.
“Everyone’s there to play basketball, but over time, you get to know people, and the students find out that you actually work at ¹û¶³´«Ã½,” said Benhart, who played collegiately at UPJ and whose father, Jack ’65, is an ¹û¶³´«Ã½ Hall of Fame forward. “Students might approach you and say, ‘I’m trying to figure something out,’ or, ‘What course should I choose?’ Sometimes it’s just giving them direction. A lot of the mentoring is informal, which makes it cool.”
Many students develop bonds with the older players, who have asked them to join their families at holiday meals or church services. And it’s not unusual for noon-ball participants to stay in touch after leaving Indiana.
From left, Bill Hamilton, Chip Dietz, and Alex Heckert have played together for more than 20 years. (Brian Henry)
Last year, Dorian Goosby-Dean, who played pickup games while his girlfriend studied at ¹û¶³´«Ã½, asked Bill Hamilton, Heckert, and Chip Dietz ’82, another longtime player, to share in a momentous occasion: he invited them to the ceremony for his induction into the Quaker Valley High School Sports Hall of Fame.
Reunions of former noon-ball participants sometimes take place unexpectedly. Bill Hamilton, the director of Video Services at ¹û¶³´«Ã½, recalls reconnecting with two former players seven years ago, far from campus.
“I was shooting in New York City, doing an alumni feature on a woman who worked for Cartoon Network, Jonneé Tonsel [’09],” Hamilton said. “So, I was meeting her in Brooklyn, and she’s coming down the sidewalk with her baby and her husband. And I look at this guy, and we got about 50 yards apart, and he yelled out my name. Here I had played ball with him.”
Tonsel’s husband immediately got on the phone with another noon-ball alumnus, and the three FaceTimed, reliving happy moments they had shared on campus.
New pickup-ball connections are still being made today. Both Wilkerson and Patrick Hamilton say they’ve developed friendships through the league with players of all ages.
Wilkerson said some of them would come regularly to her ¹û¶³´«Ã½ games to support her. Bill Hamilton made her highlight videos, and Dietz attended both the regional title game at the Kovalchick Complex and the national championship game at Duquesne. And Patrick Hamilton, now pursuing a master’s in sport management at ¹û¶³´«Ã½, said he’ll continue to show up for pickup games as his schedule permits.
The late Ed Sloniger and Bill Blacksmith M’68, ¹û¶³´«Ã½ Health and Physical Education faculty members and varsity coaches who launched noontime ball in the 1970s, probably never envisioned pickup games forging such bonds. For an hour or two, three times a week, the game of basketball builds bridges across generations, genders, and races and fosters lasting relationships.
“It’s a really special thing,” Pinder said. “It’s a brotherhood. I’ll even put it this way—there’s a family relationship that comes from it. And it really helps the students. I’ve seen some who may have been a little more reserved when they came here, and as time goes on, their confidence grows. And that carries on outside of the basketball court. It impacted my life for sure. I was encouraged and supported by these other people, and that helped me with my confidence.
“So noon-ball is not just about basketball. No, it’s far beyond that.”