Detroit Pistons honor St. Cecilia basketball gym with green City Edition jerseys

Detroit Free Press

St. Cecilia’s gym, located near Livernois and I-96 on Detroit’s westside, occupies an important place in Detroit basketball lore.

And now, the Detroit Pistons will honor the famous facility.

The Pistons are paying their respects to the unofficial mecca of Detroit basketball. On Thursday morning, the team unveiled their new St. Cecilia-inspired City Edition uniforms.

The jerseys, which were exclusively revealed to the Free Press ahead of their unveiling, are green with white and blue stripes down the sides. The quote “Where stars are made, not born” — written on St. Cecilia’s court — adorns the bottom right corner of the uniform. A trio of stars representing that message, along with the Pistons’ three championships, are located above the “D” in Detroit on the front of the jersey and on the shorts.

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“The Saint,” as it’s colloquially referred to as by its devotees, long functioned as a litmus test for the city’s best basketball talent, both professional and amateur. Many of the state’s most notable basketball players — including Isiah Thomas, George Gervin, Dave Bing, Magic Johnson and others — have competed within The Saint’s walls dating back decades.

Fans would pack the un-air conditioned gym to watch. It wasn’t always clear who would participate in pickup games on any given day. But fans and young players alike knew the odds of seeing a current or future star were high.

“To walk in this building and see Dave Bing, George Gervin, sometimes Darryl Dawkins, all of the guys that were pros, or going to be pros, it was like Christmas,” Romulus High School and Eastern Michigan alumnus, and 15-year NBA pro Grant Long told the Free Press at St. Cecilia last Thursday. “You came in here, you had no idea what you were going to see or what you were going to get, how competitive it was going to be. It was just a treat every time you walked in the door.”

Detroit-raised rap superstar Big Sean, the Pistons’ creative director of innovation since December 2020, collaborated on the jersey design. His signature is on the bottom right of the jersey, under the quote. The team will wear the uniforms, now available for purchase, six times this season.

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“We took (Big Sean’s) excitement about designing a jersey with our excitement about telling the story, and he loved the fact that we wanted to tell St. Cecilia’s story,” Pistons chief marketing officer Alicia Jeffreys said. “The green jersey comes from inspiration from the logo and then also the green mats that are on the wall in the gym. When we built St. Cecilia’s jersey with Nike and the NBA, they asked for brand inspirations. We used a ton of photography, a ton of video assets that show the gym, and they pulled pieces of the physical assets into the jersey. The green color is really a nod to what you see at The Saint.”

In addition to the new uniform, the Pistons are also partnering with JDS Sports and The Knight Foundation to commit $250,000 toward renovating St. Cecilia’s gym. In 2021, the Pistons partnered with Ceciliaville — a nonprofit aiming to preserve the gym and bringing athletic programing, job training and more to the city. The jerseys will continue those efforts, as a portion of the jersey sales will be donated to Ceciliaville.

Former Piston Earl Cureton, a Detroit native and the team’s community ambassador, serves on the board for Ceciliaville and played at the gym years ago. Stories about the gym from Cureton, along with other Pistons-associated former NBA players such as Greg Kelser, helped start the discussion for the franchise to honor the gym back in 2020.

“Them telling us those stories, I think has served as huge inspiration and solidifies or validates our reason why this is a story we need to tell because it’s one of those things where it’s unwritten history,” Jeffreys said. “If we don’t tell the history, nobody will really know what stories because I think it was a sacred place from everything Earl says to us, where people didn’t videotape, there aren’t a ton of photographs because it was just a place people went. It wasn’t about the media, there was no social media. If we don’t tell the story, nobody will actually know what happened there.”

St. Cecilia’s story started in the late 1960s, when basketball teacher and athletic director Sam Washington opened the gym as a safe haven for Detroit’s youth. The gym achieved notoriety when Bing, involved in a contract dispute with the Pistons, began training there during the holdout. It quickly became a hot spot for competitive games, in which both professionals and local high schoolers looking to prove themselves would participate in.

“I remember Sam Washington sitting right there at that door in a chair,” Kelser said. “He collected those dollars and everything from people coming in. They paid because they knew that they could pay a dollar and you might see 10 games if you’re willing to stay that long. Whether you knew it or not, you would see future great players in high school, college, pro, all of that. It’s sort of like a club, if you will.

“An unofficial basketball club. And certainly had its who’s whos as well. Gervin gets the most note because he would plug this area. There would be no place to park. It’s amazing how they would pack people in here, just standing shoulder to shoulder from here, there, and even at times, along the wall before they had that padding just to get as many people in as possible, and see these great players play.”

Ceciliaville board chair and former Detroit Police chief Isaiah McKinnon said the new uniforms show the Pistons’ commitment to the city of Detroit; he hopes they spread awareness of the gym’s importance.

“There’s some people wearing shirts right now that say ‘Detroit Vs. Everybody,’ ” McKinnon said. “We want to have the vision that St. Cecilia is the hub of so much that happened in the city of Detroit and will continue to happen. That’s what we hope that the jersey will do, and to build up this location where it continues to grow. That’s what we’re looking for.”

Contact Omari Sankofa II at osankofa@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @omarisankofa.

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