The top 100 players to play in the "Stormin' Norman's Classic" Delaware summer league will be honored next month.
The summer basketball league started with shirts vs. skins games in Wilmington's Southbridge in 1980, and eventually expanded to towns throughout all three Delaware counties with more than 2,000 players participating annually before ending in 2003.
A reunion game was played in 2019, but now Oliver has decided for the ultimate class reunion: a dinner at the Chase Center on the Riverfront which will feature the first members of their Hall of Fame.
Oliver put together a committee of basketball experts, and they selected 100 players -- 80 men and 20 women -- which will become the honorees at the event on Thursday, September 29, 2022 at 6 p.m.
"A lot of these guys now are 50 and 40 years old and they're all on Facebook and Instagram saying why they should get a jacket. I like the concept, I love the energy, but I'm really looking forward to to comradery even more," Oliver said.
Oliver said Stormin's Classic was held in a different time in youth sports, before the commercialization of youth sports and travel teams took over the system.
"Our league was free. Not one person who played in our league had to pay a dollar, not one person. We had an educational component, we had a community service component, so it was a holistic approach."
The league's many alums include familiar names like Brown, Elena Delle Donne, A.J. English, Devon Chambers, Laron Proffit, John Gordon, Khadijah Rushdan, but Oliver said he's equally proud of those who weren't one of the top 100 out of 30,000 players.
One of the league's rules were you had to participate in a 50-minute tutoring session before each game.
He said he received a complaint from a parent of a Salesianum student with a weighted 4.2 GPA that their athlete didn't need the extra instruction, but Oliver had a quick response.
"I said your son is on the same team as Lenny Brown. So he's learning from (future Xavier University Hall of Famer) Lenny Brown about how to play basketball, and Lenny Brown is going to learn academics from him, isn't that a nice trade-off? And she said "wow!"
Oliver said one thing the state is missing since his league went away was the galvanizing nature of the teams, which would be a hodgepodge of various high schools as opposed to just one school playing in a summer league.
"I think we helped to alleviate a lot of crime because a kid from Sallies would play on the same team as a kid from Howard, William Penn, and Saint Mark's, and everyone got along."
That's what Oliver hopes happens on that Thursday evening in Wilmington.
"So many people who haven't seen one another for 20, 30, 40 years, and all these people are going to reminisce, there's going to be a lot of lying (laughs) about how good they were and how bad they were, but it's going to be all fun."
