Tre Good and Jay Jones Beef
KickGenius will take the court as The Drill Sergeant today for Nike's Summer Is Serious pick-up basketball game in New York City. He was taken with the first overall pick by team captain and Oklahoma City Thunder forward Kevin Durant.
Around Fort Smith, however, he's known by his real name Tre Good.
Yes, a 2010 Northside graduate who played just a little varsity basketball is the No. 1 overall pick for a pick-up game coached by one of the NBA's best.
"It's pretty crazy," Good said. "It's going to be a good experience. It definitely feels good to be picked No. 1 overall. When I got picked No. 1, I guess my automatic thought was I kind of gave credit to our support system."
Good had a pretty good idea he'd be on one of the two teams — the other is coached by Houston Rockets guard James Harden. Nike began a contest earlier this summer and had Harden and Durant agree to coach a pick-up game with athletes from all around the country. To be considered for the team, the player had to submit videos and hashtag them on Twitter as #SummerSerious. Over a month, Nike trimmed the applicants down to 100. Once that batch of finalists was determined, Durant and Harden made their picks from the pool.
The odds were not exactly short Good would be among the 100, much less drafted. But he had his reasons to be believe.
He is KickGenius, after all.
Good is something of a YouTube star with his KickGenius channel. He and co-hosts Dre Feimster and Jeremy Jones — who was the No. 4 pick by Harden and is from Little Rock — use their channel to review and performance-test the latest in basketball sneakers. The duo provides shoe interviews, commentary and, most importantly, for Summer Is Serious pick-up game footage of the tests.
"When I read the criteria to make the Summer Is Serious, it said you had to have so much footage, skill level and video creativity," Good said. "That was right up our alley. If we don't make this, I thought, I don't know what we're doing it for."
The three have amassed 49,784 subscribers to their channel and are one of the top sources on YouTube for that niche consumer known as a "sneakerhead." If you can call 50,000 devout followers "niche." With that many subscribers clamoring for content, Good had already stockpiled hours of on-court footage to submit. Plus, no one becomes a YouTube star without having at least some creativity in their videos.
What started as a hobby has gained Good a semblance of celebrity status, a dream basketball game with Durant and Harden and a new career path.
Good was known more for his brain than his game at Northside. He was a good enough player in high school to make varsity, but at 5-foot-6 and 120 pounds, he wasn't getting a lot of time on the court. He made his mark in the classroom and picked up a scholarship to the University of Arkansas where he studied engineering. It's in Fayetteville where he met Jones. The two became friends, played pick-up games together, studied together and started making the videos.
"Honestly, I don't have just one end goal. I don't have that perfect story where I managed everything going," Good said. "I ended up not going back to UA-Fayetteville, taking a semester off and going to UAFS. It's worked out, though."
Jones will join him there, too. They get back from New York on Sunday and classes start at UAFS on Monday. Another time crunch, another opportunity is how Good sees it. It's been an nontraditional path so far, why worry now? He'll be back in his hometown and planning to change his major to something that includes software editing.
It only makes sense for KickGenius.
"This whole YouTube thing, I just love to do it," Good said. "It has to do with something I really love: basketball and sneakers. In a way, I've sort of chased my dreams."
Source: https://www.swtimes.com/story/sports/2013/08/16/northside-grad-to-play-with/26298940007/
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