A letter from the founder.
I was seventeen when I left Pickering for Phoenix. One suitcase, one reason: basketball. Westwind Prep took a kid from Ontario and made him a captain, and for two years the route looked straight — All-Arizona honors, a Division I offer, the map everyone draws for themselves at that age.
Loyola University Maryland. Division I. The dream, on paper.
Here’s what the paper doesn’t show. A redshirt year — twelve months of practicing for games you’re not allowed to play. Then a season off the bench: 22 games, my first college points scored in an arena in West Virginia, a career night that topped out at seven points against Mount St. Mary’s. Seven. I can still tell you everything about that night.
So I did the thing the highlight culture has no category for. I dropped down.
Western Nebraska Community College. Scottsbluff. A junior college in a town most of my Toronto friends couldn’t find on a map. And that season — 15.1 points a game on 51 percent shooting, when nobody was watching — is the proudest line on my basketball resume. Not because of the numbers. Because of what it cost to go get them after the straight path closed.
The route ended in Detroit. Wayne State, three games, and a January morning in 2016 when I knew. Not an injury, not a cut — a knowing. I’d run out of road as a player, and pretending otherwise was going to take something from me that I wanted to keep: the love of the game itself.
People ask if walking away felt like quitting. It felt like passing.
For years I didn’t have language for that. Then I started building things — a career in technology, open-source tools, eventually this brand — and I noticed the same hands that learned to throw a lob were doing the same work in a different medium.
The maze in our posters isn’t a design choice. It’s the route. Pickering, Phoenix, Baltimore, Scottsbluff, Detroit. Five schools, two countries, no shortcuts, and a wall at the end that turned out to be a door.
Alleyoop Arts is what’s on the other side of it. We make art and stories for everyone still in the maze. The work is the pass.
I didn’t quit basketball. I passed it to the person I was becoming. He’s the one writing this.
— Damion Rashford
Founder, Alleyoop Arts