I'm moving into the city from Marin in a month or two and was looking for a league.  This might be a stupid question but you referred to it as an "Asian community" league, I'm not asian...can I still ball?  When do seasons start, how much to join, where's it played?  etc etc.

If it's exclusive that's cool, got any suggestions on where to find a good run in the city?

Thanks.

On point #1, I just had to make a conscious decision and scale back, otherwise I would've burned out (although I feel like I'm burning out as it is). There's only so much one man can do every weekend. When there's 95 teams who need your services, that will naturally outweigh the 10-team open league and the 8-team Women's league -- although we are starting one backup hopefully, depending on my Women's commish.

If you read some of the news articles, such as the one from the Oakland Tribune, on the right side our homepage, you will see that I'm all for running leagues for any affinity group you got. I just so happen to come from the Asian community, so that's what I started with. As I've mentioned before, we have run open and Women's leagues and we plan to revive our corporate league by next year.

I could probably write a book about this, but Asian leagues have been around for at least 75 years, especially thanks to the Japanese in California and the hoops-rabid Filipino immigrants who have arrived in almost every major U.S. city. Those have been traditionally exclusive to Japanese, then a few full-blooded Chinese, then allowing more Koreans and Vietnamese (in LA only and not in the Bay, curiously), and then with the Filipinos, obviously Filipino.

We are the first "Asian" league to extend those boundaries to Asian ethnicities as defined by the Asian Games, which stretch as far west on the Asian continent as Palestine. So yes, this is the first Asian league to include Arab Americans.

Do we have people that bring in non-Asians? Yes, on occasion and perhaps surreptitiously. Are we steadfast on our rules? Not necessarily, as there's only so much I can police anyways. And the bigger picture is, if more non-Asians respect Asians as good, clean basketball players, then that can only be a good thing. I let the people in our community decide on who they want to bring in. If it's a serious enough issue that it affects teams' competitive fire, then like David Stern, I have no choice but to police the rules that my teams want me to enforce.

Anyways, all of this should be a moot point in due time as we make more leagues available to other affinity groups, be they ethnic, corporate, or whatever.

What the Japanese and Filipino leagues have done in the past in terms of the passion and organization behind leagues and tournaments, while preserving the game of basketball in terms of sportsmanship and pure skill/talent, and what dreamleague has taken to the next level (such as a 24-sec shotclock, semi-stop-time rules, advancing the ball on a timeout, double-elim playoffs, how we run things in parallel to the NBA's rules, et. al.), is truly something I wish to offer to any and all who want it.

Thank you GSOM and GSOM readers! Hope to see you on the court somewhere...

No worries from me on being an (semi) exclusive league, bringing together a community through a medium which I love (SPORTS!) is always great and I am all for that.  Props to you for taking on such a taxing and consuming challenge.  That's what b-ball should be about anyways, 5 as 1.  

To coach41, thanks for the tips..I'll probably check out the JCC that's near the neighborhoods I'm looking at living in.

    Yeah, I remember the days of the old negro leagues. I was hopin those days had gone away for ever but I guess the snake is hard to kill.
  Don't worry I won't be applying to your league any sooner than I'll be applyin to the KKK league.