It takes a village
By Jack Barnes

When The Courier asked me for a QwikTake about fixing the basketball pole at Community Church at Ocean Pines so many people had made it possible that I decided to write about the experience.

When my wife Andrea saw the busted-up basketball backboard outside of the Community Church at Ocean Pines and said "go fix that" it sounded simple enough. Just take the existing one down and replace it with a new one. What could be easier I thought?...a lot of things we found out.

Just getting the completely rusted mechanism down from the current pole was a challenge and I enlisted my friend Doug Slingerland. After using half a can of WD-40 we were finally able to get the nuts loose.  After removing four main bolts the whole thing came crashing down. Now what? I had already looked on the internet and had been to Wal-Mart checking for a replacement but there was one problem: it came as a complete basketball set which included the pole. All we needed was a replacement that would go on the current pole which was sitting in lots of concrete.

Fortunately Doug remembered that a brand new commercial backboard had been stored away in the church. It had originally been intended for use by the Sunday School but, after the church's Family Life Center was built, it was no longer needed. A great find, complete with a new basket but unfortunately it did not match up with the mechanism that fit the current pole and we were not about to tackle the job of putting in a new pole.  We needed someone with lots of mechanical know-how to help us out.

I consider the next part of the story divine intervention but it happened just this way. Doug and I, standing over the rusted mechanism at the basketball court, were wondering who might help and I said to him, "I wonder if Roger would help out?"  Roger is Roger Partridge, who owns Bumper to Bumper auto repair which is adjacent to Community Church's property. Just as the words "help out" left my mouth we looked up to see a black Lab running full speed across the field right towards us with Roger close on the dog's heels. It turns out that Roger was watching his daughter's dog on that particular day and the dog had gotten loose thus bringing Roger over to hear of our dilemma. Roger did not hesitate, offered to help, and said to drop the old mechanism and the new backboard off at his shop and he would see what he could do.

A couple of days later I stopped in to see how things were going and was surprised to find that Roger had completed the task. He had cut off the rusted nuts with a torch and with a little ingenuity had adapted the old mechanism to the new backboard.  I offered to pay him for the work but he refused any compensation.

The whole thing was loaded in my jeep and moved to my garage where I used a wire brush and some elbow grease and repainted the old mechanism. Meanwhile the pole at the church had received a coat of paint.

After reattaching the rebuilt and freshly painted mechanism to the new backboard as well as attaching the new basket I needed to get what was now an unwieldy thing that would no longer fit in my jeep back to the church. I needed a pickup truck.  Art Fallon came to my rescue when he heard my story at a birthday party for a mutual friend. He immediately offered his help. Art brought his truck over and we moved the unit back to the church where we left it on a picnic table near the basketball court.

The next challenge loomed in front of us, sitting on the picnic table. The weighty aluminum backboard, complete with basket and mechanism, needed to be lifted up and reattached to the pole.  Undeniably a little more than a couple of retirees were capable of handling.  We needed some young muscle. 

Again Providence intervened as I remembered my conversations with a personable young man at church named Mike Hindi.  Mike, a student at Wor-Wic, did not hesitate and along with fellow student Jamie Shaffer arranged to meet me at the church one afternoon to get the job done. Needless to say it was an awkward job, raising the heavy pole with both young men balanced on ladders on either side of the pole while I fed the bolts through the holes on the pole.

And just like that, after about three weeks it was all done…and it looks great.