About Half Cent Hoop
Built for the Long Game
Basketball stayed with me across a lot of chapters. I grew up in rural Niigata, glued to Magic Johnson and the Lakers. My school had no team, so I learned the game alone whenever I could get on a court. I moved to California, tested myself, then chose school over chasing a roster spot. Later I built work and family life in New York and New Jersey. I tore my Achilles at 33, stepped away, came back at 38, and I am trying to play with patience from here on out. This site is where I tell that story in the open.
The name
Why “Half Cent Hoop”
A cent is a hundred. Half a cent is fifty.
I am closing in on fifty and still playing the game I taught myself in a snow-country town that had no team to join. That is the whole name: a hooper at the half-century mark, still on the floor.
It is also a promise about what gets written here. Not a comeback story with a finish line, but the ordinary business of staying in the game: the training that still works at this age, the gear that actually matters, and the weeks when nothing happens.
Where it started
A hoop, a television, and a lot of curiosity
I fell for basketball early. In ninth grade, the third year of junior high in Japan, I was already deep in how Magic played and how the Lakers moved. My school had no basketball club, so the game lived outside the usual structure: alone, in spare moments, on whatever court I could find.
Track and field and table tennis were my official sports clubs. Useful, disciplined training. The NBA on satellite TV is where I really studied. A neighbor’s dish pulled in a clear signal almost by accident. I watched games the way some people work through a textbook: slowly, hitting rewind, trying to see why a pass worked.
Chasing the game to America
California, tryouts, and a clear-eyed stop
Irvine Valley College · California
In high school I still loved the game, and I wanted to test it in the country where it was born. I worked for a year and saved money to come to the United States. I enrolled at Irvine Valley College, went to tryouts, and on the second round the coach told me to join the team.
In the same moment I saw my ceiling clearly. I stepped back from competing and focused on school. No locker-room speech, just a practical call. I finished community college with that choice still in place.
Building a life beyond the court
New York, the web, and a family home in New Jersey
I had planned to transfer to a four-year school. Life took other turns, and I ended up in New York instead. I started a web company. It was small at first, then it steadied. Work became the long middle: build, hire, ride out uncertain stretches, then find a pace we could sustain.
Today I live in Oradell, New Jersey, with my wife and three kids. Basketball is not the center of the week anymore, but it is still in the mix.
Leaving, returning, and playing smarter
Injury, pause, and a different kind of ambition
At 33 I tried to come back to basketball in earnest. Almost immediately I tore my Achilles. It felt like a second retirement, another line under a chapter I thought had closed.
At 38 a friend pulled me back in. I play now for fun, for health, and for longevity. The horizon is simple: stay on the floor into my 70s if my body cooperates. That long-game stance is what Half Cent Hoop is built around.
I am past trying to prove something. I want to stay in the game.
The next three
Three kids, and nobody had to be talked into it
I have three kids, and all three started playing at five. I did not put a ball in their hands and I did not sign them up for anything. They watched the NBA and college basketball with me, and they watched me play.
I took them along to my pickup runs because that was simpler than arranging anything else. They sat at the side of the gym. Then they were shooting at the side hoop between games. Then they were asking when the next run was. It happened on its own.
Watching them start changed what I pay attention to. Much of what I write here about AAU, school basketball and the American development system comes from being a parent inside it, not from studying it from a distance.
Where I'm from
Snow country roots
I was born in Irihirose Village, now part of Uonuma in Niigata Prefecture. In 2026 I am 48. Basketball, migration, work, family, injury, and coming back all left marks. None of them tells the whole story by itself.
Why I built Half Cent Hoop
Who this is for
This site is for two groups of people, and they overlap more than you would expect.
The first is hoopers close to fifty, or well past it, who intend to keep playing. Not to peak, not to prove anything, but to still be on the floor in ten and twenty years. That means training that respects the age you actually are, gear chosen for fit rather than hype, and honest reporting on what works and what stalls.
The second is families who want their son or daughter to play in the United States, and who are trying to understand a system that nobody explains from the outside: AAU and travel ball, school seasons and tryouts, how recruiting actually works, and what all of it costs in time and money.
It is also a record for myself: my life on the court, and my kids’ time alongside it.
Over time I plan to build small tools from the kind of annoyance you feel in a gym or on a bleacher when you wish something already existed. Nothing flashy. Honest utility.