At age 55 and with one son ascending in the NBA and another projected as one of the best point guards in U.S. college basketball next season, Claude Nembhard could be justified in his desire to relax, put his feet up and go wherever his boys’ schedules take him.
And Claude and his wife Mary have done a lot of that, tracking Andrew through the Eastern Conference Finals with the Indiana Pacers, and Ryan with Gonzaga University through the Sweet 16 at the NCAA Tournament this past spring.
There’s a strong chance that their family basketball journey will take them to France this summer, presuming that Andrew joins the Canadian men’s national team at the Olympics.
If all goes well, they’ll be back on it this time next year as Ryan wraps up his senior season leading perennial powerhouse Gonzaga on another national championship run before he tries to make his way to the NBA, and the Pacers continue their climb in the Eastern Conference with Andrew building on his breakout post-season performance.
But the elder Nembhard isn’t ready to be a full-time sports dad just yet, and besides, he’s used to wearing multiple hats.
While building a successful career as a financial planner, Nembhard spent every weekend and most weeknights coaching both his boys’ teams through the Ontario Basketball Association system and beyond.
“It was a passion,” he says. “I worked Monday to Friday to so I could coach when I wasn’t working.”
So what do you do when there are no more teams to coach, and your sons are already at or approaching the highest levels of the sport?
Well, you put your hand up to run the whole thing.
On Wednesday, Nembhard was named chief executive officer of the Ontario Basketball Association. He earned the position after an exhaustive search process undertaken by Dunstan Consulting that narrowed nearly 100 candidates to a ‘Final Four’ with Nembhard eventually earning the top role.
It’s a big job. While Canada Basketball is the national sports organization of record in Canada, setting policy for the sport domestically and representing the country globally, the ‘boots-on-the-ground’ work is done by the provincial sports organizations which manage the sport locally, and of those, Ontario is by far the biggest, representing 180 clubs and more than 50,000 players.
With scale comes excellence: of the men’s national team’s 14-member ‘summer core’, the group which will form the foundation of the team headed to France for the Olympics, 12 started their competitive basketball experience in Ontario. It is the same story on the women’s side, with 10 members of the 2020 Olympic team calling Canada’s most populous province home.
“We’re the engine,” says Nembhard.
But engines – no matter how powerful – need regular maintenance, and occasionally a full overhaul. And they need a good mechanic.
This is where Nembhard hopes to be able to help. He’s spent a lot of time under the hood; few have seen the game in Ontario from a more comprehensive collection of angles.
A lifelong player, he got into coaching before he ever had kids, starting as a house-league volunteer in suburban Markham with the Markham Unionville Minor Basketball Association.
By the time Andrew had come along and was old enough to dribble, Nembhard was coaching at the rep level and assisting former York University star guard Enzo Spagnuolo with the OBA’s elite development camps. He says that experience may have inadvertently given Andrew a leg up in his development as he would go over the ball-handling drills with his son – then only five or six years old – in their basement in Vaughan to make sure he had all the teaching points down before presenting to the younger teenagers in the OBA program.
Eventually, Nembhard coached Team Ontario as well as some of Canada’s top AAU programs, and at various points estimates he coached up as many as eight future NBA players.
He also has experience at the executive level, first on the OBA’s board of directors and then as the OBA’s interim executive director for 15 months from March 2021 to June 2022, and has seen the organization go through a fair amount of change. In his now full-time role, Nembhard will be the organization’s fourth executive leader in as many years, with similar turnover at the board level.
And through his sons’ experiences, he’s seen a little bit of everything, and now feels compelled to share.
“This is my give back,” Nembhard says. “I’m at a stage in my life right now where Ontario basketball has given a lot to my family, a lot of lots of experiences from me and my wife, Mary, and it’s a passion of mine right now to give back (to the) organization and take the sport to new heights.”
The specifics of his plan are yet to be determined, but Nembhard says his broader priorities are to make sure that basketball reaches all corners of the community and to make sure that accessibility to every level of the game isn’t limited by cost.
He’s confident because he feels that between his leadership, the board’s guidance and the outlook of the organization’s staff, there is an unprecedented degree of alignment.
He says a lot of his role will be business development, creating or identifying additional revenue streams that will eliminate participation barriers.
“We have to find money. Meaning, right now we’re very dependent on the government or one source of funding. We have to expand that to private money, corporate money, more ministry money, different ministries, to really grow this game,” said Nembhard. “… We want to be inclusive to the whole community, different groups, underserved communities that haven’t been serviced and make sure to service those groups …. But the underlying fact is we have to create, find some money to do these things, because, we have big dreams, we have great ideas, but if we don’t have funding, we can’t get these things done.”
In his own family’s basketball journey, Nembhard has walked down every road imaginable.
Now, he’s eager to light the way for others.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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