A group of young designers are making their mark on professional basketball through an innovative partnership with the Cleveland Charge, the NBA G League affiliate of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

The Charge lost to the College Park Skyhawks, 120-95, in front of a crowd of 4,431 at the final home game of the season this past Sunday, March 23 at Cleveland Public Hall. The Charge now have a 14-18 record.

But the 10 students, ages 14 to 17, who designed the graphics on the warm-up shirts worn by the Charge, were all smiles as they saw the players wearing their creations, got to meet the team, and enjoyed an evening of professional basketball.

The game was the culmination of a four-week Cavs for All the Land graphic design clinic, led by members of the Cleveland Cavaliers ’graphic design team at Cudell Recreation Center. The students are part of the Cavs’ “Bigger than Basketball” initiative, overseen by Kevin Clayton, executive vice president and chief impact officer of Rock Entertainment Group and the Cleveland Cavaliers, as part of the team’s community impact and diversity efforts.

“Basketball is just a conduit to other kinds of enhanced skills and how we can impact youth in different ways,” Clayton explains. “If you think about basketball, it’s kind of a lure—it's like, wow, now that we're here, what are all the amazing things that we can do? "The whole concept of what we're doing is using basketball to enhance the desires of these youth.”

The graphic design team greets Charge guard Jules BernardRon Fields, who has managed Cudell Recreation Center since 2006, sees the graphic design program as a perfect fit for the community center.

“We have a lot of kids that don't necessarily want to be in the sport of [basketball], but they want to be in the behind the scenes of everything," Fields observes, adding that the students got a lot of satisfaction from working on the project. “They had the freedom to express how they feel about a design. Each kid gets to pick out a couple of different ideas for a logo, they send them to me, and I send them off to [Cavs community outreach & impact manager] George Hill and his team. And then tonight they're going to bring it all together and come up with the finished product.”

Fields says the recreation center's focus on youth programming made it an ideal location to launch this initiative. "About 90% of our attendance is kid generated," he says, “with 65,000 to 70,000 people a year coming through the door."

In fact, the Cavaliers have partnered with Cudell Recreation Center since 2018 to host basketball clinics, dance clinics, and the Cavs’ annual summer program called Hoops After Dark. The Cavs have also partnered with Cudell to renovate its main gym and other rooms, and have also added a meditation room, game room, and computer room.

The Charge players wore their warm-up shirts on Sunday night, and every participating student also received a shirt.

To commemorate the special project, Fields says he plans to create a display at Cudell rec center. "We're going to get the final shirt and we're going to frame it,” he says. “and then get the kids in a [framed] picture, put it underneath, and put them in the hallway.”