Boys & Girls Clubs of Rochester<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cThey played down here in the Bitty Basketball Program, and what Jaden used to do, he used to come in, participate, just sit down and watch, and then once he was old enough to start playing, Jaden started playing,” said Reginald Smith, health and PE coordinator at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Rochester.<\/p>\n
And they never stopped. Trained by his father from a young age, Council, Jr. was a star player at U Prep before playing for four different colleges, including St. Bonaventure and Kansas.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of traveling, spending money, time with him one on one sometimes, you know, just watching him enjoy it,\u201d said Chalonda Dillon, Council, Jr.’s mother. \u201cThat’s his happy place, the court.”<\/p>\n
“All the times we spent in the gym and I’m thinking he\u2019s not paying attention and when watching me play he actually was paying attention,” said Melvin Council, Sr.<\/p>\n
Now, proud parents and the entire community are ready to see these Rochester ballers hit the court on the national stage.<\/p>\n
“These two people to my left and to my right? They believe in me. And they always told me don’t put your head down. And I always had nights where I’d think that I wasn’t good enough or I wasn’t that and they just believe in me,” Council, Jr. said.<\/p>\n
The Boys & Girls Clubs of Rochester says Council, Jr. will be there Friday afternoon to help celebrate the club’s reading awards celebration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rochester, N.Y. \u2014 (WHAM) Two local basketball stars are turning their hoop dreams into reality. Rochester natives Jaden…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":726554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":["post-726553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/726554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}