OTISFIELD – In a few months, they’ll be wearing different uniforms, trying to make each other look bad on an NBA court.

Wednesday, though, seven NBA players gathered in Maine to play for the same team and teach the value of teamwork and togetherness to children from countries where people of different racial or religious backgrounds do whatever they can to remain separate.

This was the second straight year the Seeds of Peace International Camp held its “Play for Peace” basketball clinic, hosted by NBA players Brent Berry, Matt Bonner, Carlos Boozer, T.J. Ford, Brian Scalabrine and twins Jarron and Jason Collins.

The Seeds of Peace brings together teenagers from as many as 21 different countries, most of them in the Middle East, to teach respect and empathy in hopes of sending them back to their homelands willing and able to coexist peacefully.

Sports are a major tool used by the camp to get the kids to learn the value of teamwork and working together towards one goal, according to the camp’s founder and director, Tim Wilson. To that end, NBA agent Arn Tellem, a member of the camp’s board of directors, initiated the clinic last year hoping it would help the campers. He found that it also benefits the players.

“They show what’s the best of the NBA – teamwork, sportsmanship, and respect for all types of people,” Tellem said. “Hopefully, they impart those types of values to these kids and make a difference in their lives for a day.”

“Every one of the guys who came here last year felt that they got a lot out of it, and really followed the events of the Middle East in the past year much more closely than they did before,” said Tellem, who attended the same Otisfield camp when he was a youth, when it was called Camp Powhatan. “Some of the players have stayed in touch by e-mail with some of the kids that they met here.”

Two of the players who participated in the inaugural camp, Berry and Boozer, were eager to return this year.

“I learned a lot more from them than I probably taught them,” said Boozer, a forward from the Cleveland Cavaliers. “I felt like I got a great experience from it. The experience and the kids are what brought me back.”

While players like Boozer and the Collins brothers, at nearly seven-feet tall, towered over the campers, Ford, a first-time visitor who many campers could look directly in the eye, hoped he could relate to the teens and vice versa.

“I think this is a great experience for me and the other guys that are here, to get an understanding of how people from other countries are living,” said Ford, a point guard from the University of Texas who was the Milwaukee Bucks’ first-round pick. “I just want to tell them that everyone has to get along and everyone has to make some kind of effort and contribute in some kind of way.”

The players received rousing ovations from campers when they were introduced Wednesday morning. Some campers wore paraphernalia from their favorite NBA teams, showing the league’s world-wide appeal.

“This is what these kids need to see,” said Wilson. “These guys are intelligent. They’re not just basketball players. They’re just good people. I’m very happy that they’re here.”

Paul Roit, an Israeli camper, isn’t a big NBA fan, but was still excited to see the players.

“It’s famous people after all,” he said.

Roit and the other campers took part in shooting and passing drills on the camp’s outdoor, asphalt court, under the watchful eye of Berry and Bonner. The drills reinforced what the teens have been taught since they arrived at the camp.

“We’ve already been working together for nine days,” Roit said. “We don’t mind working together. We don’t mind about our differences.”

Who better to convey that message to the campers than players from the NBA, a league that has become increasingly diverse with foreign players flooding the league in recent years?

“Basketball is a sport with teammates from all kinds of different areas,” said Scalabrine, a forward with the New Jersey Nets. “I pass the ball to guys from Florida, from New Orleans, and we don’t have any kinds of differences at all. That’s what we’re trying to bring to these kids, that it is about teamwork and unselfishness.”

Prior to the clinic, former Denver Nuggets and Atlanta Hawks general manager Pete Babcock spoke to the campers about choosing their dream, finding their path to it, and then living it. The dream of the camp’s founders, Wilson said, is that the youth who come to Maine will return home as the foundation for reconciliation and peace among civilizations that have been fighting for hundreds or thousands of years.

They may be closer to that dream today than when they started the camp 10 years ago.

“We came here a little bit afraid, I think,” Roit said. “But eventually, when you sleep together, you eat together, you see that it’s not that horrible to do things together.”

rwhitehouse@sunjournal.com

Copy the Story Link