No borders for local hoops star

Basketball has opened a lot of doors for Shae Fitzpatrick, but if a couple of years ago someone had asked the former Lynnfield High star if she thought it would bring her to the threshold of the Taj Mahal, she probably would have laughed.Then again, the Brown University basketball player probably never envisioned herself riding through the streets of Old Delhi in a bicycle-drawn rickshaw or waiting at a toll while monkeys swarmed all over the outside of the car, but that was her life for two weeks earlier this summer.As a recipient of Brown’s Royce Fellowship, Fitzpatrick was able to combine her passion for basketball and her desire to experience a different part of the world. She did this through the National Basketball Association (NBA) and its Basketball Without Borders program.Basketball Without Borders is the NBA and International Basketball Federation’s global basketball development and community outreach program. It unites elite young basketball players from various parts of the world in an effort to promote the sport and encourage positive social change in the areas of education, health and wellness in the communities it visits. The players are placed on teams, without regard to race, religion or nationality, and they are coached by NBA players and coaches.Since it began in 2001, more than 250 current and former NBA players, coaches and team personnel have worked with more than 1,200 athletes from more than 100 countries and territories on five continents.”I wanted to do something with basketball because it’s such a huge part of my life,” Fitzpatrick said. “I wanted to study the impact of basketball in other cultures, the globalization of the sport and the impact it has on society.”When she started putting together her proposal to work with the program, Fitzpatrick didn’t know where she would end up geographically, but come June 24 of this year, she was on a plane headed for India.Once she arrived, Fitzpatrick helped put on a clinic for youngsters at a local YMCA in New Delhi. Fitzpatrick said she has been involved in basketball camps both as a player and instructor for years, but this was a whole new adventure.Fitzpatrick said she had the opportunity to see the conditions in which they live and get a feel for some of the challenges they face. She walked the congested streets of New Delhi and saw the slums that some of the youngsters called home.”The poverty over there is on a completely different scale than what you would see here,” Fitzpatrick said.She said the very poor didn’t seem to have much access to basketball, especially the girls, who traditionally have not been encouraged to play sports. She did, however, say she got the feeling that girls playing sports was starting to become more acceptable.”A lot of the girls I talked to loved playing sports,” she said, recalling a meeting she had with players on a 14-year-old girls team from outside New Delhi that had just won a championship.Fitzpatrick also had an opportunity to meet and work a little with the players from the elite teams who were being coached by the NBA players. The 50 boys, who came from 17 different countries and spoke a variety of different languages, all came together with basketball as the uniting factor.Although Fitzpatrick has traveled to the southern part of the United States during the summer months, she said the heat she experienced in India was in a league of its own.”It was over 100 every day. I’ve been down south, but I’ve never felt heat like this before,” she said.The clinics and activities she was involved in often took place on outdoor courts, which meant doing things early in the morning or at night to avoid the worst of the heat. She did get to do a little sight seeing while she was there and one of the things she was most impressed with was the Taj Mahal.”It was absolutely incredible, with the white marble and the blue sky in the background,” she said.Fitzpatrick also took with her a few other observations – one being that the food