For more than 175 years, the 19th century red-brick Gothic-Revival church building at the corner of Franklin and Cathedral Street has been occupied by a church congregation. First by the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church and for the last 20 years, by the Unity Baptist Church. The building is stunning, with two towering octogonal spires featuring louvered belfry openings looming over Cathedral Hill. But although songs of the choir no longer echo through the neighborhood on Sunday mornings, a new project, no less mission-driven than the church, has been quietly animating this historical building at the very heart of the city.
The long walls of the sanctuary area are still lined with stained glass windows and organ pipes, but punctuating them, set in closer to the center of the room and a bit lower, are a series of basketball hoops. Bright lights from the tall church ceilings shine down upon the gleaming wood of the court.
“Two years ago when we came in here, there were pews, a stage. None of this was in here. We literally cleaned it up ourselves,” says Sam Brand, the founder of Sanctuary Collective, gesturing at the space around him.
“The court was donated. The city gave us a grant for the basketball hoops. And basically, the owner was like, if you can get the basketball stuff in here through your relationships, I’ll fix up the ceiling, the HVAC, the electric, all those kind of things.”
Brand is one of the most successful basketball coaches Baltimore has produced. He was the coach — and math teacher — who brought the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute from an academic powerhouse with a barely noticeable basketball program all the way to the state championship. When he left Poly, Brand began coaching for Team Melo, the AAU basketball program founded by Carmelo Anthony, one of the greatest players to come from Baltimore City. Now, Brand and his new nonprofit, Sanctuary Collective, are trying to save the spirit of basketball as he and so many others grew up playing it in this city.
“When somebody talks about Baltimore, they talk about grittiness. When someone talks about a Baltimore basketball player, they talk about grit,” Brand says.
For generations, that “grit” provided a way up and a way out for young kids in Baltimore through basketball. The city’s rec centers, parks, and outdoor courts produced great players such as Anthony, Muggsy Bogues, and Reggie Lewis. But over the last couple decades, something has changed in the sport.
“It’s like everything else, rich guys figure out a way to get an edge so they can get their kids the best,” says D. Watkins, director of “We Used to Win Here,” a short film about the way the city’s basketball culture has changed, co-author of Anthony’s memoir, “Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised.”
“It’s like everything else, rich guys figure out a way to get an edge so they can get their kids the best.”
D. Watkins
“If you can’t afford it and your natural talent can’t beat their money, then the story of coming from somewhere in urban America and making it to the NBA just disappears.”
This is the dynamic that Sanctuary is designed to correct. Watkins, and plenty of others, believe that Brand is the person to do it.
“He understands the world where you can have 15 or 20 dollars in your pocket and board a plane to go play AAU somewhere and get meals and a hotel and all that,” Watkins says. “He understands the world that’s dominated by sneaker companies, that’s dominated by rich kids who can afford to pay like $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a month for the top trainer, the top equipment, the top clothes, gym memberships, specialized diets and all of that.”
“He can bridge those two worlds and realizes a lot of kids get left behind because they can’t afford to pay that, and he’s trying to make an opportunity for them.”
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On a late afternoon in June, the gym fills up with about a dozen advanced elementary school students. On the court, the sound of bouncing basketballs echoes through the massive space. Brand discusses the importance of a 50/50 ball — which he casts as a moment in life where everything is up for grabs and could go either way.
To show this, he runs a drill. “You’re gonna step up. You’re gonna keep your feet moving real fast, ready to react to a 50/50 ball. I’m gonna put this ball out there somewhere. It could be anywhere,” Brand says. “We’re gonna play it until it goes in the basket. Other than the other basketball rules, no rules.”
In the course of the drill, two very skilled players, one of whom is Brand’s youngest son, bump each other with stiff shoulders. After the initial basketball lesson — you lose an offensive foul if you lower your shoulder to bump back — he goes into a larger lesson on the difference between being emotional and being determined. These kinds of lessons are the essence of the Sanctuary Collective — the same skills that make someone good at basketball can be applied throughout life.
“Here’s the thing: if someone’s emotional, they might not be focused,” Brand says. “When you’re determined, you can maintain your focus.”
Sanctuary will now offer this high-level, elite basketball training to Baltimore City kids on a donation-only basis. And this, Brand hopes, could reverse current trends giving rich kids all the advantages in the sport. But more importantly, it takes those valuable parts of training and imparts it to students who may not go on to play in the NBA.
Sanctuary will now offer this high-level, elite basketball training to Baltimore City kids on a donation-only basis. And this, Brand hopes, could reverse current trends giving rich kids all the advantages in the sport.
Brand likens it to a program training neurosurgeons. Not everyone who goes through such a program will actually become a neurosurgeon, but each of them will be better in some other field for the rigorous training they receive, and many will have jobs adjacent to the rare star neurosurgeon.
As an example, Brand cites Reginald Thomas II as “my first pro.” Thomas embedded with Brand’s team at Poly as a photographer, chronicling their journey to win a state championship. He’s now the team photographer for the San Antonio Spurs.
“I spend a lot of time reflecting on what that experience meant, not only for how my career turned out, but what it means to be discerning about people’s character, and how to support people, and how to show up, and how to be my authentic self, and also how to stay true to what your mission is and what you really want to do,” says Thomas, who spent two more seasons volunteering with the team after his story was published.
For Brand, basketball is the draw that can bring students into a larger, more holistic program.
“So, if our kids want to be basketball players, then let’s teach them what it really means,” Brand says. “Let’s teach them that getting an education is part of that process, that learning how to play a role within a group and support the mission of the group over oneself is a part of that process, learning how to deal with conflict when you really want something bad through competition and it doesn’t go the way you want, or you’re arguing with someone else about accomplishing that goal. How do you handle that disagreement? How do you handle the disappointment of loss? These are all things that help you as a professional leader, as a productive citizen later.”
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Brand’s first memory of basketball is a pickup game on a makeshift court with crates as hoops in a backyard on Barclay Street, between 22nd and 23rd streets during a cookout with the family of legendary Civil Rights activist Rev. Annie Chambers. Brand and his father, the activist and professor Michael Brand, were the only white people at the cookout. That was the experience through much of Brand’s time as a player in the city.
“It’s not like I haven’t noticed that most of the spaces I’ve been in, I’ve been the only white person,” he says, his husky voice a mix of the city’s white and Black accents.
Both at Poly and Morgan State, Brand was one of the only white players on the team. Between those two, he was on the team at UMBC and quit — not only the team, but eventually the school — when the coach said something he perceived as racist.
“I’m not trying to be anything that I’m not but I’m also grateful that I was raised in a way that if I am the only white person, [I’m not] without a perspective of what that means in the situation.”
Brand’s father and Marc Steiner, long-time journalist and radio personality, were radical leftists who created the South Baltimore Collective, which organized a tenants union that united Black and white renters across the racial divide of S. Charles Street, which separated
Sharp-Leadenhall from pre-gentrified Federal Hill. That sense of the power people can gain by working together inspired what the Sanctuary Collective could be.
“The collective mindset and what a collective was…that was the inspiration,” Brand says. “When you’re developing all these different sides of a young person, having just one perspective simply doesn’t work. We’re taking into account the educator and the nutritionist and the strength coach and the mentor and also the basketball coach, all collectively.”
“The collective mindset and what a collective was…that was the inspiration,” Brand says.
Though he is best-known as a coach, Brand used to tell his Poly teams that he was a math teacher first, and he is still as much teacher as coach.
While Brand’s father introduced him to radical politics, his mother, Joanne Goshen, an artist, introduced him to the city’s art and culture scene. He joked about an artist and an activist raising a jock.
“I got to see basketball and pursue it through growing up with two parents in different parts of the city,” he says. “I just got to see a whole perspective of our city as I became a piece of the Baltimore basketball community.”
When Brand started teaching math at Poly, the school’s basketball program was in shambles, with a team that had only won three games the prior season. Brand wondered why the schools that excelled academically failed athletically, and vice versa, often forcing students to choose between the two. He set about changing that, ultimately winning three consecutive state championships in 2017, 2018, and 2019.
Then, in 2021, Brand announced he was leaving Poly to coach in Team Melo, which has a youth development component like the one Brand would develop with the Sanctuary Collective.
It is as director of Team Melo, which has a relationship with Nike, that allowed him to see what corporate money is doing to elite basketball.
“Corporate entities like Nike, Adidas, and Under Armor have been a part of creating this dynamic. So, part of my mission is helping them be a part of fixing and addressing it,” Brand says. “Like, here is this guy who’s a director of a Nike-sponsored program who sees that the corporate interest in this space has fucked it up. So I started a nonprofit to address it that Nike should support.”
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Watching Brand move about, working with kids in the former sanctuary, it is clear that the work is as mission-driven as any church — and that sentiment extends to the entire team. Jamal Atkins, the chief training officer, has worked developing top youth players in Africa and Europe. But he grew up in Baltimore. “I grew up coming in and out of this church,” says Atkins as he walks from the foyer into what was formerly the sanctuary of the Unity Baptist Church. “The musicians for this church lived directly behind me.” The mission for Atkins, as for Brand, is still one of the salvation that basketball used to offer kids coming up out of poverty in any given corner of America.
Atkins was so inspired by Brand’s vision and his leadership that he began working in a volunteer capacity, in part because of the environment the Sanctuary was becoming.
“Some days, he walks out of here in shambles because he’s just been here all day,” Atkins says of Brand. “It is very clear that this is a family business. His sons are here normally. His mom comes down to help.”
Greg Butler is both a key player in the program and proof of the power of Brand’s ideas. Butler played on Brand’s Poly team, where he performed well enough to get a college scholarship, which he was unable to accept due to a quirk in Baltimore City’s calculation of GPA: not giving any extra points for Honors and AP classes, as other districts in the state do. Angry about that injustice and stuck at home in Baltimore, Butler had a brief moment of notoriety after puncturing a firehose during the Uprising following Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Brand helped Butler through the legal difficulties that followed, and Butler is now an essential part of Sanctuary’s partnership with the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, located around the corner from the old church. There, he helps develop school culture and climate, which includes restorative practices, conflict resolution, and creating and fostering relationships with parents and community organizations.
Butler says it is all about the connections Brand built that go far beyond the actual team. It’s “how he dealt with my family and my dad, and supporting us in any and every way he could. It really, really created a bond.”
Butler likens it to a family, and Brand — who started Sanctuary Collective, he says, with little more than his retirement package from 11 years as a public school teacher — knows that the endeavor could not work without his family’s support. And they are all in. Brand’s wife, Dominique, works as the chief financial officer and is essential to the running of the whole enterprise. “Equity and giving back, and like, just being healthy and having this holistic model — everything that we’re doing is within our values,” Dominique says.
She left the corporate world to begin working at Sanctuary, doing whatever needs to be done to keep the daily operations of the new program going. “It’s great to be able to have our kids here and have them see us do this work,” she says, “because they’re also learning, too, and how to be, you know, more responsible, understanding how much is involved with running a business.”
Over the summer months, Brand spends from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. at Sanctuary most every day, running camps and programs for players of different levels, from the most elite players in the city to the very beginner. This last part is important for Brand. Though the Sanctuary Collective provides elite training, working with beginners is equally important. “We need people to know you don’t have to be Michael Jordan to come here,” he says.
But there is still a long way to go to meet the radical, holistic goals of the organization. “We are in the process of raising the money and getting our community partners so that we can fully develop the space, and then turn it into what we hope provides a model for what a community center could look like that contributes to the community,” Brand says. “We do basketball development at a high level, but we do community building at a high level as well.”