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“The most surprising thing for me was how many people showed up on day one. And that continues to be the most surprising thing — that people are still showing up on day 300.
Every time a stranger comes, I’m just like, where did you come from? It is amazing, and it’s a huge motivator to keep me going.” — Aria McManus

TRANSCRIPT

Bailey Richardson: Kevin and I always say you can’t fake the funk. If you’re starting something for other people, you actually have to be into the thing.

Where does that come from with basketball for you? Your dad was a basketball coach, right?

Aria McManus: My Dad and my brother both coached my junior high team at Linwood Rec Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

It was this tiny team and we were so bad. It was just like embarrassing for everyone, but we had the best time.

Some of my best friends now are from that team just because of this camaraderie. It was such a team effort. Even though we would lose, it was kind of like we got to make that choice whether we were going to care.

I also swam and did gymnastics and those were such individual sports. This basketball team was a first—very team oriented. You had to depend on other people. And you also could be like, “oh no worries, no worries,” if someone messed up.

It was such a funny thing when people would airball. It’s funny because we were like, I didn’t think I was going to do that. You have to, you know, say it’s not embarrassing for other people so when you air ball they do the same for you.

So that team was just a full gossip train. It wasn’t about skills. You’d just be in line for a drill, and turn to your friend to talk. So what happened this week? And it was junior high gossip so nothing was happening. Nothing, nothing. It was just gossip about, like, he talked to her at recess. So I think that was why I really enjoyed a sport as an activity because you could be bad and still have fun.

BR: So take me back. You moved to New York, you’re an artist by day and a creative director too. At what point do you decide to start a basketball team?

AM: It was the summer after graduating college or maybe the year after that. It was this big transient time for like a lot of people. A lot of my friends from college were moving away, and at the same time other friends were moving to the city.

Aria and longtime teammate Hannah Rothkuo in lower Manhattan. Photographs by Kai Elmer Sotto.

My boyfriend was very much in the arts community and I was kind of like in it but not in it. So I was at an opening, and I had this idea for a team because I remembered my junior high team as just being so much fun. I kind of just pitched it to people—I was like, it’s about to be summer. Would you guys be down to do this?

Great women—Taylor Larson who’s on the team, Miranda Lovett—were all at this opening. And I was like, I don’t want to lose you guys. I had just met these people who were really funny and down to be friends. We had peripheral friends but I was just like, let’s kind of shape this a little bit. Then we went to like a diner afterwards and then I pitched it to a smaller group of like 10 more people.

“I really enjoyed a sport as an activity because you could be bad and still have fun.” — Aria McManus

BR: Can you tell me what that “pitch” was? How did you sell people on the idea?

AM: What do you guys think about a basketball team that is for women but were bad and we just go have fun.

BR: When I tell my friends they should come play basketball, they are so tentative. They all want to say “I can’t, I’m so bad.” I have to emphasize that the team is literally for girls who are bad at basketball, but they still kind of don’t trust me.

How do you convince people who are new to come out?

AM: I usually talk about my stats, which are low. I tell them I haven’t made a basket for a few weeks and I started the team. Then they’re like, oh, I’m sad for you.

I remember a moment when I was younger. My friend fell in a puddle. It was funny and I didn’t want to make her feel bad. She was at a fancy dinner. So then I sat in the puddle. It was so funny and it wasn’t really that embarrassing. But I just got to put us on the same playing field. That’s how women especially feel comfortable with each other—if they’re like on the same scale. So I try to put myself in a little bit of a lower tier in hopes of making the team feel more approachable to new people.

BR: I played a sport in college, so I’ve been doing f*cking intense sports for so long. And I think downtown girls’ basketball was the only time that I can remember, even like sixth grade soccer, where fun is actually more important than anything else. When new girls come that take basketball pretty seriously, I watch them and it takes a while for them to get to the point where they’re actually cool with just having fun with friends.

I want to ask you about that first practice. What are the details? Did you text your friends to come? Where did you get the court?

AM: I sent an email out to everyone that I knew that was a woman — a close friend or on the peripheral of my life. Maybe we’re not best friends, but we’ve hung out in some capacity.

I put my phone number in the email. and I made it really goofy and had like cat basketball images on it and stuff, which is an ongoing thing. I literally have not stopped since.

BR: Just to color this out, every week you send an email out with a bunch of Internet images that are tied to a basketball theme. Could you give a few examples of some images that are in an email from you?

AM: I love the religious themed ones. We’ve had Jesus playing basketball. Menorah basketball.

I try to include in the email at least four images of the same thing. Three images means the trend is rare. That makes it less special. But if I can find four images, that means it’s like a visual movement somewhere.

More recently I became less creative, and now I do a random generator for searched for words plus basketball. Or people send me strange images and I’ll reverse image search to find similar things. Like, you know, mountains with basketballs in them or clouds that look like basketball. I liked that it’s kind of an inventory of all things basketball plus other,

BR: You should do an exhibition. You’ve just been replying all every week, so that anyone who is on the list can see all the previous emails you’ve ever sent them right there in their inbox. The visual imagery in those collective emails is pretty insane.

AM: The first ones I would spend a couple hours on the text too. I would make like a little story out of the shape of the text—you know, a house, it’s like a basketball player, but it was made out of like parentheses and periods. Or I made ones that were white text on a white background so you had to highlight the text to see it.

BR: Was that part of the shtick with the very first email or were you pretty straightforward to start?

AM: The very first email was like that.

I had curated an art show where I sent emails to famous artists asking them to participate. To get there attention, I made weird emails. I found that the crazier the emails got, the more responses they got. So I carried that idea over the basketball invites.

BR: So you send a really weird email out to every peripheral woman you’ve ever met. How did you find a court to play on?

AM: I thought the ones on Allen Street in the Lower East Side would be available, but then they weren’t. So I texted a bunch of people that we were moving to a new court in Seward Park. It was a half court.

I texted a lot of people to try to come because I was not sure if people would come or get my email. But the first time we played like 30 people showed up. I was like, wow. I mean I was like shocked if one person showed up. I was really nervous but I just thought, okay, I used to do this. I remember what basketball practice was like. And it was a really fun time

We didn’t keep score. We just like messed around. It was so silly and everyone was so bad. There was no one good at all. The ball would go into the tennis court next door.

BR: Whenever I ask someone new at practice how they found out about Downtown Girls’ Basketball, it’s almost always Instagram. Can you tell me about when you started the account and like what’s your approach with it?

AM: We didn’t have an account for the first two years. We were just doing basketball in the summer then, and people would use a hashtag on their photos. But I didn’t think I needed to make an account specifically for Downtown Girls Basketball. Everyone would just post it on their own and say like, I’m a part of this team.

It became like kind of a word of mouth thing. If I saw a photo on your Instagram, I would reach out to you individually.

Then we got in touch with this team in LA called the Pistol Shrimps. They’re a little bit more of an organized team—you know, a league and they play in an indoor gym and had an Instagram account for the team. And I was like, Oh yeah, we should do that too. So they inspired us to just create our own platform.

The team photo was always something we did. They used to have commemorative photos of teams with coaches, remember those? Like you’re in your costume—your jerseys and uniforms. It was inspired by those. And it was for highlighting and thanking people for coming who were new. People often felt like, “I haven’t come before, I’m not going to be in the team photo.” It’s a little moment to be like, “You’re on the team and we’re showing that to the world.”

BR: Now you always take that photo with your camera and at the end of practice you use Airdrop on your phone to send it to anyone who wants it. Was that always the case?

AM: Pretty much.

BR: You’re a creative director, you have a very strong visual sense. It’s what you’re trained in.

One of the things that I like about the Instagram account is how approachable it is. There are other people starting teams and their photos can feel very like polished and perfect and well lit. That polish is stuff that you know how to do, but you’re choosing not to do it. Why?

AM: It’s just so much effort to do that.

I really wanted the focus to be the experience of the people attending and not the extra stuff.

There was a moment, maybe three years in, where we started doing a lot more press and events and stuff. I realized that energy changed the vibe of the community if we did it too much. If there’s cameras and if there are a lot of people who are just coming for the camera, it changes the mood and it changes the vibe of the experience when you’re physically in the room.

So that alone was a cue to me, just reading the room basically, that people don’t feel as comfortable with a camera and a sense of presentation in the air. When that happens, it means we’re not having as much fun. So the effort in putting more polish is not worth the lack of fun it creates.

It’s also about showing reality. The highlight reel [Aria’s Instagram posts and stories from each practice] started because there would be like so many funny moments and I wanted to kind of show them off. I could also point those clips to be like, this is our skill level.

For a while, a team member was posting these highlights on a popular men’s basketball highlight account on Instagram. We got like thrown in there a few times with our highlights. The comments were insane because we were just terrible. Like “What? Why did that girl just double dribble?” People were just so confused.

People just can’t understand why we’d break the rules. You either completely follow the rules or you don’t play. And we’re just like, do some of these rules matter?

So I think the visual approach comes from that combo of just going with the flow and not wanting it to be polished and showing the skill level.

It’s purely going with the vibe. Even to the logo is that way. My boyfriend surprised me with a bunch of jerseys for my birthday. He made a few logos and sent them to my friends for feedback and they picked one. How he actually came up with the logo was he just googled the words and used what came up on Google because he knows how I do the emails and stuff. He just Googled the word “downtown,” and that’s the font that comes up. Same with “girls” and “basketball.” So it’s a kind of silly but kind of cool. It’s like it’s on brand kind of for how I do the emails, et cetera.

BR: Tell me about those t-shirts. You bring them to. Pretty much every practice. We usually play white versus dark, so it’s convenient because if a player forgets a white or dark color, then they can just grab one.

But you also sell them, right?

AM: There available online to buy. I usually say like $10 for teammates and $20 for everybody else.

BR: Do you ever see them around New York on people you don’t recognize or know?

AM: I don’t think I have yet. I do see them on teammates, but I haven’t tried to promote them a lot.

But it’s really nice. I see teammates just around town. My mom visited and it felt like every time we went out of the house I saw someone from basketball. She was just like, this is crazy.

BR: It’s amazing thinking about you having a dad who was a basketball coach and as a kid in Minnesota, you were like, I’m not good at this. But now you’re like the girl kingpin of basketball culture in New York.

AM: I mean my dad’s not like a professional coach. He just happens to have been my volunteer coach in junior high.

But once I was in some Nike zine. There was a photo of me holding a basketball in it. I didn’t even know that the zine was being distributed at their Soho store. Both my parents were visiting New York and we went in to go buy something, and my dad opens this zine that he just like sees that I have three photos in it. I’m like on the back cover. He starts flipping out. He literally shows it to every employee. I was like, Dad, come on, you’re embarrassing me. These people are cool. This is Soho. He was like, but she’s bad!

Kevin Huynh: Are there rules at Downtown Girls Basketball?

AM: The main rule is it’s open to people who don’t identify as male, but we don’t usually allow like spectatorship.

Then you have to not mind if other people are bad. The basic motto is if you happen to be good, you just have to not mind if other people are bad because that’s a thing.

And then we don’t really call fouls and stuff like that. It’s kind of an Honor Code. Self-policed. If there’s a person that’s really good and they double dribble, like they’re expected to call it on themselves. But if it’s a brand new person and they don’t know what they’re doing and they double dribble or travel, we’re just like let it go, you know? So it’s a little bit of a sliding scale of normal basketball rules.

KH: What do you do at each practice as the head coach?

AM: I have a friend that just started teaching high school and I’ve picked up a lot of things from her about managing a big group of people at once.

The key is routine. Do the same thing every time so everyone kind of knows how to follow along. You’re not retelling everything each time.

Then I’ve noticed like if we don’t warm up enough, certain people like get less into it. There are certain games that are like quieter and I’m like, oh, we need to warm up. We need to mentally and physically have a little bit more of a transition into basketball. Plus there are a bunch of strangers there often too. We have to shift into this feeling of like these are my teammates. That arc is supposed to happen every game. I orchestrate that.

BR: So many things in New York are one-offs. Why have you stuck with basketball for six years?

AM: I just had too much fun. I was like, I need this. The girls who came seemed to like it too, so why not?

At first I did it just in the summertime. The winter transition was a little bit more involved — when you play inside you have to reserve a court. Before we would find courts that that had like one person playing and we’d just kind of be like, hey, we’re going to be over here. Sorry. I tried to not do that too much.

And so the things that have gotten more professional about it is renting courts, getting gyms set up with permits and getting insurance. We have a great friend who like let’s us be under his insurance for his league. All that stuff is like really expensive to do on your own.

BR: One of the things that we hear from people who are running a group similar to what you’re doing is that in money can be really challenging. If you wait too long also to ask people for money, it becomes a more and more tense situation.

At the end of each practice you ask for a $10 suggested donation that people just Venmo you. At what point did you start asking for that and was it a big deal?

AM: The first three years or so I wasn’t booking stuff. I was just finding a court. So I was like, I’m not going to ask for money. I’m doing this for fun and I’m not putting money down to get the court.

Then we reserved the first gym and I thought of it as like, oh, this is just my gym membership costs for the month. I don’t want to ask people for money because it was too special for me. Not to say that it’s not now, but eventually I realized that it was more sustainable to have the cost even out by the end. There’s like indoor fees, insurance fees, and fees to rent a court outside.

So I made it a $10 suggested donation to keep it open to everyone who wanted to attend. I like to keep it like cheap and it’s just like to cover costs because I’m getting joy out of it as well.

BR: I like that you said it’s about sustainability. This doesn’t have to be about you making a boatload of money.

AM: Definitely not. I just want to sustain it.

There is a weird psychological thing too, which is not why I do it, but that when you pay for something, you think it’s more valuable. You’re just like, I fulfilled this and so I’m a part of it.

BR: So you started this email thread with friends six years ago. I’m curious to know — how many people are on your email list?

AM: There are 420. Yep!

I don’t have an unsubscribe button… People have moved and have written me — “Hey, can you take me off?” And I’m like, yeah! Sorry for the spam.

That’s one reason why I was like, if I’m going to be sending emails weekly I need to BCC. I used to just CC everyone, and people started replying all just saying , “Sorry, I can’t make it tonight!” Or, “Hey, my friend’s apartment is available. Does anyone need it?” So no. Let’s not use this as everybody’s audience.

Only when things go wrong like that do I change something. Like from day one Downtown Girls had such a perfect equation. I only respond to anything that is glaring or when I get suggestions.

KH: Do you feel like downtown girls’ basketball is a community?

AM: For sure. I’ve seen so many different friendships form because of it, which is really beautiful. I don’t have to be a part of every friendship group that happens. So I think it’s that and running into people around New York or being like, “Oh I think I recognize you from basketball.” That’s such a great feeling. It makes New York feel like way more approachable and community oriented. If I just like show up to things by myself, there’s probably like a 20% chance I’m going to run into someone who has come to basketball over the six years that I’ve been to it. So I already feel at home and comfortable and that it’s safe.

BR: For me, playing basketball once a week has been a magical entry point. From just this one thing that I do, so much good has come out of it.

It seems like you had a hunch about that in the very beginning, but what did you think was going to happen when you started it?

AM: My goal was to just group people so I didn’t have to have like 50 different coffees in order to keep friendships up. To have a lot of good friends that are not hard to plan with. And to collect all these different people in one place. We can overlap in a noncompetitive way, which as an artist is hard. There is a community to arts but it’s also a little bit competitive. Same in office spaces. I freelance, and I notice a lot of office bonding comes from negativity because it’s such a bonding thing complain. But it is also super unhealthy. It becomes really toxic and it spreads.

So I was wondering how can you create bonding that’s positive in whatever environment it is? I didn’t really have a sense that I was going to have this go on for six years. It was just like, oh, I did this on a whim and it went well and so I’m still doing it.

BR: You list Downtown Girls Basketball on your website next to all of these badass galleries that you show in and the arts collective that you’re a part of.

I don’t ever feel like the team is part of your art, but knowing the kind of work that you make—kind of silly, kind of cool, absurd but approachable—it feels like there’s a connection there. How do you think about that?

AM: I have an arts collective that is very much community oriented and I have this basketball team that’s very much community oriented. I think that’s like an inevitable part of what I want to do just as a human.

Whether it’s doing things as a human or doing things as an art project, it’s kind of the same thing in the end, right? Whether it’s physical items I’m putting into the world or concepts that I’m putting out into the world, I think it’s kind of the same thing.

If I labeled it my art project, I think it would become a little bit more exclusive. You’d just feel like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that I was a part of this social experiment.” So yeah, I’m not taking it so seriously like I do take an art practice or a job. It’s freeing in that way.

Basketball has taught me to just ask everyone you know about whatever project you’re doing and guaranteed they’ll know 10 people to help you with it or be a part of it.

And then like, don’t take yourself too seriously. With basketball I don’t adhere to the rules that I put on other things — like that it has to be perfect before I tell anyone about it. That kind of mentality is not always helpful—having things to be so precious—because everything is an evolution. It’s never perfect the first time you launch it. So those are like weird abstract thoughts I’ve taken away and apply to other practices.

BR: For me, New York is a place where people take themselves very seriously. That has to be the secret sauce of Downtown Girls Gasketball, right? You’re just like, I really don’t need to go take myself super seriously at basketball with my friends. Let’s pull that seriousness piece out of the equation as the one thing we don’t need.

What’s been the biggest surprise from Downtown Girls Basketball, good or bad?

AM: The most surprising thing for me was how many people showed up on day one. That continues to be the most surprising thing—how many people show up on like day 300. I’m just so floored by that. Every time there’s a stranger that comes, I just wonder, “Where did you come from? How are you here? This is amazing.”

That continues to be such a huge motivator to keep me going. Sometimes I’m like, I’m lazy, but then I remember it’s going to be so good after I meet that new stranger that came to my thing.

BR: It’s pretty amazing. Last week there was a girl there who didn’t speak a word of English, who lives in China, who’s a famous blogger there. She did not know how to dribble, and just ran around with the ball in her hand. Because it’s New York City, two people on the team speak Mandarin fluently and communicated with her.

So here we are, a group of women in a gym in New York. These girls who live 6,000 miles away went to the small middle school gym to play basketball with us. It’s pretty amazing.

AM: Yeah. And she scored on her first shot. Didn’t know for sure.

Every time there’s like a moment like that it’s really awesome to see.

I try to be both open and closed about how attendance and filming and stuff works. So I have a lot of like rules in regarding to like working with outside people filming us. They have to be like a fly on the wall.

BR: Because you guys have had a lot of exposure. Instagram’s Instagram account has come. Nike has come. All these big brands want to come in and capture the energy that you have.

AM: Right. But we play basketball and they’re just kind of in the corner most of the time. A few times I tried to get them to play so that they realize they’re not a voyeur. That way they can feel the team energy and that’s a way better relationship than approaching photographing us like, we’re going to watch you. I’m like, no! Just come play. That’s the whole point. It’s more like a friendship.

BR: Aria, thanks for your time homegirl!

AM: Of course. Absolutely.

Aria in lower Manhattan. Photograph by Kai Elmer Sotto.

Bailey : Kev : Kai.jpg — Get Together is produced by the team at People & Company.

We published a book and work with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
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This team of women are specifically bad at basketball, and they keep showing up to play 🏀 Aria McManus of Downtown Girls Basketball

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