A new year’s basketball tradition gets extended beyond the Bohannon family

CEDAR RAPIDS — Perhaps it was just a way to keep his kids awake late enough for the entire family to ring in the new year together. Perhaps he really believed it.

At any rate, you’ve got to say he was right and it worked.

Gordy Bohannon always told his four sons that they’d have good basketball luck that year if they put some shots up just as the clock struck midnight January 1. An early bird gets the worm type of thing in a sense.

So that’s exactly what Jason, Zach, Matt and Jordan Bohannon did. Religiously.

Each year at least one of the brothers, usually a combination of them, would shoot hoops right at 12 a.m.

“I will always remember the millennium, the year 2000, I was 10 years old and Jason was 13,” Zach Bohannon said. “I thought I had shot a ball at exactly the right time, but Jason was like ‘No, you shot it a second too early! That’s bad luck for the rest of the year!’”

There never was really any bad luck for what you could call Iowa’s first family of basketball. All four Bohnnon brothers played Division I college hoops: Jason at Wisconsin, Zach at Air Force and Wisconsin, Matt at Northern Iowa and Jordan at Iowa.

New year’s midnight basketball started at Gordy and Brenda Bohannon’s home in Marion, inside or outside, depending on the weather. But it carried on to Linn-Mar High School, the Kohl Center in Madison, Wis., Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City or Clune Arena in Colorado Springs, Colo., at various times.

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Sunday it took place at the Marion YMCA. With none of the Bohannon brothers playing competitively anymore (Jordan retired this season after playing professionally last season for the Iowa Wolves of the NBA G League), Zach decided the perfect way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of this neat little family tradition was to extend the family.

He hosted a midnight shootaround for youths in the Linn-Mar Basketball Academy program of which he is board chairman. Roughly 50 to 60 boys from third to eighth grade showed up to participate.

“My goal is to make this a national event, to do this all across the country, to get kids in the gym,” Bohannon said. “Our goal as a family was always to grow the game of basketball, just like we’re seeing. Whether it was our family at Linn-Mar or us going to college, Marcus Paige, Caitlin Clark ...

“That was the goal, to get more people attracted to the game than when you left it. I thought ‘Well, shoot, this is the 25th year of our tradition. How can we just let it die?’ So I thought you know what, how about if we try to get this to be a national movement?”

Bohannon, who was the main mover and shaker in getting the three-year-old Marion YMCA constructed, opened the facility’s doors at 11 p.m. Sunday night. He had scoreboard clocks in the gym area running in a countdown to midnight.

There were no official games or anything here. Just kids having fun.

“It’s cool that they (the Bohannons) focus on the young people,” said Landon Glew, taking a break from hooping it up with some of his sixth-grade teammates. “That they don’t overlook us. It’s really fun that people care about us and the sports that we play.”

“At 10:45, I was laying in bed,” said Nick Glew, Landon’s dad. “I rolled over and saw (him) also laying in bed. I thought ‘I’m not sure we’re going to make it here.’ But he popped up and is excited to be here. They’re out there going hard. It’s pretty fun.”

Zach Bohannon hopes Sunday wasn’t just a continuation of new year’s basketball, but a beginning as well. Family schedules prohibited all four brothers from attending Sunday’s event, but they do all live in the Cedar Rapids, Marion, North Liberty area.

It’d be pretty cool some year to see them all be together and play some basketball at midnight. Be even cooler to see kids all over the United States play some basketball at midnight.

You can never have enough good luck, you know.

“Let’s see where this goes Year 1,” Zach Bohannon said. “Maybe next year we can use some connections with the YMCA to make this a YMCA movement. Get people to get that first shot up of the new year all across the country. See if this takes off.”

Comments: (319)-398-8258, jeff.johnson@thegazette.com