Alex Patten was told as a young child he could not play basketball. Doctors had found a brain bleed, he underwent brain surgery, and he received a head plate at age six — restrictions that kept him off the court until he was finally cleared to play in fourth grade. Now, decades later, the Fairborn High graduate is running a 13-team alumni basketball tournament across the Miami Valley with $20,000 going to the winner.
The tournament, which Patten organizes with co-partner Ritchie Moody, is a winner-take-all, single-elimination event that charges $2,500 per team to enter, according to a report from the Springfield News-Sun. Thirteen high school alumni teams are represented, including squads from Fairborn, Xenia, Springfield, Wayne, Carroll, Vandalia Butler, Trotwood Madison, Thurgood Marshall, Dunbar, Anna, Sidney, Portsmouth and Westerville South. The event is open to everyone, and Patten first started an alumni game six years after graduating from Fairborn High, per the same report.
Semifinal matches are set for Saturday in the Miami Valley, with Anna facing Vandalia Butler at 4 p.m. and Springfield taking on Thurgood Marshall at 6 p.m. The championship game is scheduled for 5 p.m. Sunday, August 23, at the Athletes in Action John Wooden Family Fieldhouse in Xenia — the only facility outside UCLA to carry Coach John Wooden's name, according to Cru. Athletes in Action, founded in 1966, operates as an international sports organization headquartered on the 250-acre Xenia campus, per Athletes in Action.
From $3,000 at the First Game to a $50,000 Vision
Patten's tournament started small. The first alumni game raised $3,000, the Springfield News-Sun reports, and Patten originally planned a much bigger event — a 64-team tournament with a $50,000 grand prize. He has since told the paper he hopes to expand to a 64-team regional bracket next year, with regional tournaments planned in Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus, Athens, Findlay, Toledo, Cleveland and Akron, and an eventual goal of establishing tournaments in all 50 states, with state winners advancing to a national tournament.
Along the way, Patten tore his Achilles while refereeing a pre-tournament exhibition game, per the report. He also founded the Premier Basketball League, which has operated for almost 12 and a half years and recently featured 24 teams across three ability tiers, running spring and fall seasons with 10-game schedules, according to the same account.
The Kingston Ending, Named for His Son
To keep games from dragging into late-game foul-fests, Patten built his own version of a target-score finish, which he calls the Kingston Ending — named after his 4.5-year-old son, Kingston. It stops the clock at the final four-minute mark and adds seven points to the leading team's score to set the target for winning the game, the Springfield News-Sun reports.
The concept borrows from the Elam Ending, the target-score rule created by Ball State professor Nick Elam in 2017, which shuts off the game clock under four minutes in the fourth quarter and adds eight points to the leading team's score so every game ends on a made basket, according to The Basketball Tournament. The rule was designed to eliminate intentional fouling in the closing minutes. Since TBT adopted it in 2018, target-score endings have spread to the Canadian Elite Basketball League's full seasons starting in 2020, the NBA's All-Star Game starting in 2020, and the Unrivaled women's 3-on-3 league's 2025 launch, per Wikipedia.
Regional Roots in High-Stakes Alumni Ball
The Miami Valley is already familiar with this kind of format. University of Dayton Arena served as a primary host site for TBT regional rounds from 2021 through 2024 and hosted the tournament's national championship rounds in 2021 and 2022, anchored by the University of Dayton's own alumni team, Red Scare, which fielded that roster across six tournament appearances, according to Flyer News. Four consecutive TBT championships between 2019 and 2022 went to university alumni teams, including Ohio State's Carmen's Crew along with alumni squads from Marquette, Syracuse and Buffalo.
TBT itself, which began in 2014, has continued to raise the stakes nationally. In May, TBT doubled its winner-take-all grand prize to $2 million for its 13th edition and introduced a revamped 16-team structure splitting college alumni teams from non-alumni teams, according to Forbes. On August 2, non-alumni squad Davis Steel captured that $2 million championship, defeating Kentucky alumni team La Familia 67–59 in Lexington, Kentucky, after competing in TBT for 13 years, per the Basketball Tournament's own accounting.
Familiar Names on the Rosters
Patten's tournament features rosters stocked with players who went on to college and professional careers. Daequan Cook played for Ohio State and spent 13 years as a professional, including NBA stints with Miami, Oklahoma City, Houston and Chicago, the Springfield News-Sun reports. Andre Wesson and his brother Kaleb Wesson both played for Ohio State, while Amari Davis played for Wisconsin Green Bay, Wright State and Missouri. Andre Gordon played for Texas A&M, D'Mitrik Trice now plays professionally in Germany, Joe Thomasson plays professionally in Greece, and Jumpin' Joe Ballard once played for the Harlem Globetrotters.
Patten, who was born in England and works as an auditor at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, also graduated from Park University and has three children. He told the Springfield News-Sun the games have been entertaining and have attracted good crowds so far. Regional sports events across the Dayton metro area more broadly draw between 60,000 and 65,000 visitors annually and generate between $18 million and $34 million in local direct visitor spending, according to Destination Dayton figures reported by Hoodline — a backdrop that helps explain why alumni basketball has found such a receptive audience in the Miami Valley.
Whether Patten's vision of a 64-team, multi-city regional bracket and a path toward a national tournament comes together next year remains to be seen. For now, the focus is on Saturday's semifinals and Sunday's $20,000 championship at the fieldhouse that bears John Wooden's name — a fitting stage for a tournament built by someone once told he would never get to play the game at all.
