The Mini Mustangs needed a coach.
In tiny Munising, a town of about 1,900 on the south shore of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, it’s not always easy to find volunteer coaches for recreational sports. The youth basketball program’s organizers asked Jaris Goings to take on the third-grade boys.
I’ll do it, he said, if my son and nephew can play. His son was in first grade; his nephew in kindergarten.
Not that anyone would have known; that kindergartner was as big as the third graders, his mom recalls. And, it turns out, pretty good at basketball.
That kindergartner was Braylin Calhoun. Now an eighth grader at the Milwaukee Academy of Sciences, he’s one of the most talked-about young prospects in American basketball, especially since he and his mom relocated to Milwaukee earlier this summer.
A mom’s sacrifice and a long commute
There’s not a lot to do in Munising, and Emily Cook didn’t have Wi-Fi. It was just her and Braylin a lot of the time.
An athlete herself – she played basketball at Lakeland College – Cook got her larger-than-average son playing tee-ball, soccer, basketball and football. Young Braylin briefly harbored NFL dreams, but by fifth grade or so, basketball was king.
“He would be in third and fourth grade, and we would be outside, and I’m forcing him to do left-hand layups for fun,” Cook said. “I’m a little more intense as a mom, but it’s also a way that we bonded, through sports.”
“It’s like art,” Calhoun said of why he loves basketball. “You can do so much with it… it’s not something where you can just start playing for one day and be amazing at it. You can be super fast, super athletic, and if you can’t dribble the ball or shoot it a little bit, you’re still gonna be trash.”
Even when he’s not playing basketball, he’s playing basketball – asked about his non-basketball hobbies, all he could think of was playing NBA 2K, the basketball video game.
Calhoun ended up on a traveling AAU team based in the UP. Just as he was getting into middle school, that team played in a tournament in Appleton, about a four and a half hour drive from home. Coincidentally, one of the referees in that tournament played basketball for Lakeland at the same time Cook did. That ref recognized something special in Calhoun.
“He’s like, ‘Hey, I know a team that could really use him,’” Cook recalled. That team was Milwaukee-based Power 5. Cook let that current season finish up and accepted that fact that her son needed access to better coaches, better competition, better gyms.
“He’s gone beyond where I can bring him,” she said.
She then reached out to Power 5 and “never looked back.”
One of the Power 5 Coaches, Raymont McElroy, heard about this new kid from Munising, which, it turns out, is not too far from Northern Michigan University, where he’d played his college ball.
“That’s a very small [world],” he said. “If you went there you probably gonna know somebody that knows somebody … and we made that connection when I talked to Emily.”
For nearly three years, Cook and Calhoun would drive more than five hours to Milwaukee at least twice a month for practices and tournaments. (Well, Cook would drive; Calhoun would sleep.) To pay for the gas, not to mention the hotels and other costs associated with travel basketball, Cook worked three jobs.
“It was really nice to see how much she cared about it… but it was kind of hard to watch,” Calhoun said. “She would get home, eat, walk the dog, and then go to her next job.”
It wasn’t sustainable, but the question was where could they move to be closer to the highest level teams and coaches? A state employee, Cook briefly considered Detroit, where she could reasonably transfer into another state job. But Milwaukee was always calling.
Among those advocating a move was mentor Ant Wright, a former University of Michigan standout, now a basketball commentator and content creator. He said he rarely pays attention to new Twitter followers – he has just shy of 100,000 – but something about Cook’s profile picture caught his eye. Then he looked at some of the videos she posted and thought Calhoun looked like a pretty decent high schooler – then realized he was only 13.
“I was like, what do you mean he’s 13?” Wright recalls. He shot Cook a DM. That was a little over a year ago, and they’ve been on the phone at least once a day since.
“People wait their whole lives and don’t run into a talent like Braylin,” he said.
Wright has offered tape breakdowns, technique critique, as well as advice on life as a baller.
Wright posted a video taken last year when Calhoun dropped 63 points in his first game in eighth grade, in Munising (yes he was in eighth grade last year and this year; we’ll get to that in a moment). Wright’s post of the video got more than a million views, he said, and commenters said Calhoun needed better competition.
“I’m like, this is where he lives. You can’t literally go six hours away,” Wright recalled.
But that’s exactly what Cook and Calhoun were doing, so Wright said he was one of the proponents of Cook and Calhoun taking the leap of faith to relocate.
And that’s just what Cook did in July. While Calhoun was away for two weeks at nationals (which Power 5 won, by the way), she found a job in Milwaukee, quit her job in Munising, sold her house in Munising, and found an apartment in Milwaukee.
It was a bit too much to make that move, and massive cultural shift, and choose a high school all at the same time.
“Instead of just jumping into a town that’s 300 times the size of [where we were], and having to figure out where he’s going to high school and stuff, we decided that he’s going to redo eighth grade this year, and then we will just focus on him getting better, getting used to the city, and then test out Milwaukee Academy of Sciences, and then maybe get to know other schools if we need to,” Cook said.
She noted that his new middle school has more students than his hometown has people.
Calhoun will play for the MAS middle school team in the winter and with Power 5 the rest of the year. He said the AAU competition is sharper – “all 10 guys (on the court at any give time) are the best players on their school ball team,” he said.
@braylin.hoops Had fun playing with my guys this weekend 10-0 this season we are just getting started 🏀💪#basketball #power5 #dunk #notfinished #undefeated ♬ original sound – Braylin Calhoun
“The best player I can be”
Ray McElroy, Calhoun’s Power 5 coach and the varsity high school coach at Milwaukee Academy of Sciences, said Calhoun’s work ethic is what stands out most.
“The biggest thing that stands out to me is he’s a gym rat,” he said. “He’s definitely the best eighth grader I’ve coached … I would say top three best eighth grader I’ve been around, period.”
Wright noted his team-focused style of play.
“He’s so unselfish… he’ll do whatever the game calls for,” he said, calling Calhoun a “utility all-star.”
McElroy noted that living full-time in the Milwaukee basketball community is going to be tougher than what Calhoun is used to.
“It’s a tough basketball scene,” he said. “But at the same time, it’s gonna make him tougher. It’s gonna literally make him better.”
Calhoun said he’s already gotten one D1 college offer, from the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. McElroy said he’s had conversations with representatives of Iowa State, Alabama A&M and Kentucky. Cook said he got a tour at Wisconsin during one of the Badgers’ recent camps.
“I really think he’s a pro. I think he has a real true shot to get in the NBA,” McElroy said.
That’s not exactly how Calhoun articulates his goals. Asked what his goals are as a player, he said he just wants to “just turn into the best player I can.”
When considering college offers, he said he wants to play for a program that will continue his development. He said he’ll want to play for “somebody that can develop me and get me to the next level and turn me into the best I can be.”
McElroy said only two things will keep Calhoun from an NBA career: injury, or “getting intertwined with the wrong people.”
No one we talked to was very worried about that second thing, though.
“It’s insane how good of a kid he is,” said Wright, his mentor.
“Great kid, great teammate,” McElroy said. “I really don’t have anything negative to say about him… he checks all the boxes, literally … The fact that he has the support system of his mom and the way she sacrifices for him speaks volumes.”
Calhoun’s godmother, Elaine Robbins, is a vicar at the church they all attended in Munising.
“He has maturity that goes beyond his age,” she said. “He’s had opportunities to misbehave and go to the wrong crowd, and he never has.”
She said the boy she’s seen grow since he was a toddler hasn’t let the attention he’s been getting inflate his ego.
“He doesn’t have a big head with his talent. He stayed very, very humble,” she said.
And, she said, he’s in good hands.
“I would trust Emily with my life,” Robbins said. “She’s very responsible and very honest. I think she’s going to do really well at guiding him.”
Cook noted another benefit of moving to Milwaukee. In Munising, there was only one other Black family. In Milwaukee, he’s already got an auntie – the mother of one of the other players on his team has taken him on as her “nephew.”
“There’s more than just basketball that is good for him here, being a young Black male,” she said.
Not being the only Black kid in class has been “a lot more nice,” Calhoun said.
Winning a national tournament, moving to the class of 2031, and moving to Milwaukee has got the basketball world buzzing about the possibilities for Braylin Calhoun. But while the pundits and influencers are putting him on their watch lists and all-star teams, he’ll either be in the gym working on his long-range jump shots, or button-mashing on 2k.
