Playing for Jimmy V - RHoops Alumni set to enter The Basketball Tournament

A couple of former Rutgers Basketball managers are once again trying to get a team of Rutgers men's basketball alumni together to play in one of the summer's most popular basketball events, the TBT (The Basketball Tournament).

For those of you that don’t know about the tournament, teams were formed consisting of various college basketball alumni coming back together one last time to make a run at playing together again in a tournament against other schools alumni. The games are televised on ESPN during the summer and the winner of the tournament get the grand prize of $2 million dollars. Along with the grand prize, there are also some incentives for fans and supporters of the team as well.

This year's Rutgers team will again be ran by former Rutgers basketball managers Alex Neumann, Matt Johnston and Vinny Vetrone. However, there is a little twist to this year's team compared to years past. Over the past couple of years the team was called team UKnighted, but this year, the team has partnered with the Jimmy V Foundation and is now called “Playing for Jimmy V”.

The Knight Report was able to catch up with the teams general Neumann to talk about this year's team and how Rutgers fan can help get the team into the tournament and more.

“So the team consists of former Rutgers basketball team managers Matt Johnston, Vinny Vetrone and myself,” Neumann told TKR. “We had a team a couple years ago and we really enjoyed it, so we wanted to make another run at it. This time around we had an opportunity come up to partner with the Jimmy V Foundation and given his Rutgers background, it really gave us the motivation to field a strong team this year.”

A partnership with one of the most popular foundations around doesn’t just come out of thin air, but it is something the former Rutgers basketball managers pitched to the foundation. Now the two have partnered up for not only the tournament, but also an opportunity to potentially help raise money too.

“We approached them with the opportunity,” said Neumann. “With our Rutgers background and Jim Valvano being a Rutgers graduate, we just came up with the idea of partnering with them. They do some incredible work as a foundation and we’re honored to be able to partner with them for this tournament. We’ve seen teams partner with various foundations in the past, so we started a partnership. This is a great opportunity to have fans rally around a team of former Rutgers players, as well as raise money for the foundation at the same time. This is just something that we all wanted to be involved in.”

In years past the team has featured names such as notable alumni like Myles Mack, Jerome Coleman, Kadeem Jack, Dane Miller and various other former Scarlet Knights. So far this year's team has a couple more recent Rutgers graduates.

“We currently have Corey Sanders, Deshawn Freeman, and CJ Gettys,” he said. “We’re thrilled to have all of them want to become a part of the team. These guys were very popular among the Rutgers community and were just some of the names that fans really enjoyed watching play at the RAC. After those couple guys, we have a really exciting list that includes a couple of guys outside of Rutgers including forward St. John's forward Bashir Ahmed who just committed to our team recently. We should be announcing more names shortly.”

At the moment the goal is to win the whole tournament, but before that can happen this team consisting of Rutgers alumni needs some fan support in order to help increase their roster size, to help become as competitive as possible..

“Our ultimate goal is win the whole thing, grow our fanbase, make this an annual team, and raise money for the Jimmy V Foundation,” Neumann said. “The biggest thing that we need right now is for fans to sign up on the TBT site and become a supporter for our team. If we secure 1,000 votes it gets us a 10th roster spot, 3,000 votes an 11th roster spot and we are planning on needing both of those to finish out our roster. And of course we would love to see as many fans as possible at the games in July in Syracuse.”

Fans, alumni, and supporters of the team can go to the link HERE, to sign up and vote on the Playing for Jimmy V team to help them achieve as many roster spots as possible to help them achieve their goal of winning The Basketball Tournament!