5 a.m. basketball “brotherhood” comes to Nassau

The 5 am Brotherhood is a co-ed, Suffolk County-based basketball club that hosts open, early-morning games starting at, you guessed it, 5 a.m. every weekday in a competitive but fun, safe and family-like environment for hoopers from all over Long Island. They have now officially expanded into Nassau County, and are inviting players of all skill levels to join the contests and be a part of something bigger than themselves.

The 5 a.m. games — known in the parlance of hoops as “runs” — began in Lake Grove, and have been taking place every weekday since last summer 2022. They are now set to begin at various LA Fitness branches around Nassau, with the first one happening earlier this month in Freeport.

Mike Edwards, who lives in Uniondale and drives to Lake Grove every week to play, said he was excited to see the games move closer to home. Edwards, 29, was introduced to the brotherhood last summer by a friend, and has been playing a few times a week ever since.

But what makes the travel across the island to play basketball at 5 a.m. worth it? For Edwards, the quality of the runs say it all. “For me, it’s the sort of camaraderie, the fact that the games move pretty quickly, they’re organized, and there’s not really a lot of commotion that goes back and forth.”

Edward gives all the credit to the 5 am Brotherhood’s founder, John Peloso, a New York City police officer who played basketball at both Queensboro and Suffolk community colleges before moving on to a career in corrections and eventually law enforcement.

Peloso’s inspiration for starting the Brotherhood is the recognition that many adults don’t have an outlet to relieve the stresses and tensions of their lives. He believes that the mental discipline to wake up so early to play basketball can have a productive impact on the rest of your day and translate positively to other aspects of your life.

“Working in Rikers, I got to see really good basketball players in jail,” Peloso recalled, “so when talking with them, I just realized that a lot of people, if they would have had an outlet or have had somebody to go to besides gangs and the negative things around them, they wouldn’t be making the same mistakes they did.”

Peloso explained that the Brotherhood is bigger than basketball — It’s about community and establishing a sense of family. The once small group, which started out as a circle of friends that would meet up and play every morning, has since grown to around 20 players consistently who gather for games each weekday, and much more in a Saturday-morning league. The games in both the weekday runs and the Saturday league are recorded, so players can save and revisit them.

The group also plans on hosting community initiatives, such as backpack giveaways and partnering with different Police Athletics Leagues to bring basketball tournaments to different areas of Long Island, New York City, and the rest of the state with the goal of fostering relationships within the communities they represent and giving back to those within them. This year they also sponsored a summer pro-am team for the yearly tournament at Bolden Mack Park in Amityville.

The Saturday-morning league is off to a great start, comprising of eight teams and over 50 players from various parts of Long Island, and is still continuing to grow. The league keeps players’ stats, livestreams games on Twitch and plans to host an all-star day, which Peloso said would be held in honor of fallen NYPD officer and friend Alexis Ramirez. The league’s standout players will go head to head in an all-star game and take part in activities such as 3-point shootouts, dunk contests and skills challenges.

“I didn’t know what to expect at first,” Christian Bryant, a 24-year-old from Hempstead who plays in the Saturday-morning league, said, “but it’s pretty much been like a family. It’s a bunch of hoopers. We all wake up early, everybody loves ball, and we all connected in that way.”

Bryant has also come to be a believer in Peloso’s notion that the games serve as a kind of therapy. “If you got stuff going on in life, it's just a good outlet to go there,” Bryant said, “and you just feel like, ‘All right, I'm here to hoop,’ and just let everything out.”

More people began showing up and wanting to play after Peloso dedicated a social media page to the Brotherhood. “By making an Instagram, I wanted to show people that this isn’t just all about basketball,” he said. “This is more than that. People are seeing that we’re having fun with each other, people are actually playing, and they could talk to each other and have a good time with no drama.”

Peloso said that his goal is to eventually expand the 5 am Brotherhood statewide and create large communities of players. “What the 5 am Brotherhood could do,” he said, “is bigger than any community affairs that any police department in the whole world could do.”

To learn more, and to find out where the next Nassau County games will be held, follow the group on Instagram @5amBrotherhood.