Getting In The Game
Outdoor basketball is close to Dan Peterson’s heart. Growing up in New York, he played on a variety of courts. But his junior year of high school, a new public outdoor court was built at the community middle school, and Dan and a few other players began holding informal basketball practices there during the summer.
“Consequently, we had the best year in ten years of our high school’s history,” says Peterson. “Just one new outdoor court had a really huge impact on my life and on the life of a lot of people I was close with. It really changed the dynamic of our local basketball culture.”
Basketball continued to influence Peterson’s life after High School. He went on to play Division 1 basketball at Iona, and later began working for the Memphis Grizzlies as their Senior Coordinator, Health and Fitness Initiatives.
It was in Memphis where Peterson first realized the potential for impacting communities by investing in their local outdoor basketball courts. Upon realizing how many of Memphis’ public courts didn’t even have lines painted on them, he saw an opportunity.
As he told Artsy in a recent interview, “At first, I was just painting black or white lines on asphalt: the three-point line, the foul line, out-of-bounds.”
That’s when he had an idea. “I thought, ‘I’m already out here working in these parks, so how can I add something interesting and unique to these courts that will excite the community about visiting and playing on them?’”
The answer was to turn each court into a canvas.
“For me, someone who’s loved basketball my whole life and has always enjoyed art, I see them both as passions expressed creatively. Whether it’s on the basketball court or on a canvas, it’s people doing what they love and a way to express themselves.”
The results were obvious – the courts Dan’s Grizzlies team helped renovate saw positive shifts in usage, safety and community pride.
ourts in New York. On top of that, like-minded community advocates have reached out to Peterson as a resource for their “art court” projects in Oregon, Syracuse and Baltimore.