Grand Rapids — A passion for basketball, a love of math and a keen sense of sportsmanship pushed Kyler Jackson to the front of thousands of students hoping to participate in the NBA Math Hoops Global Championship in late June.
Kyler, soon to be a freshman at Innovation Central High School, was one of just 24 students — out of around 200,000 applicants — selected to participate in the worldwide competition, which took place June 24-27 at Barclays Center in New York City.
Kyler wrapped up the weekend with a third-place finish, and had a blast along the way.
“It meant the world to me,” Kyler said of the NYC trip, adding that the competition was “fun and fierce.”
“Everybody was trying to get that trophy,” he said.
NBA Math Hoops is a basketball-themed board game that develops math skills. Students draft players and use real-life NBA and WNBA player statistics to score points. Success hinges on quick thinking, player stats and chance.
Rolls of the dice determine which players are eligible to take a shot; students then have to select the best player for a given shot based on a statistical breakdown of that player’s chances of scoring.

“You have to add, subtract, divide and multiply,” Kyler said. “It’s a very competitive board game.”
One thing Kyler learned was that the most famous players are not necessarily the ones you want to count on when it comes to making shots.
“It’s better that you go off of statistics,” he said.
Applying Math to Real-life Situations
Kyler was introduced to the game through the after-school STEM Scholars program offered by STEM Greenhouse, a nonprofit organization that partners with Grand Rapids Public Schools to increase students’ proficiency in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
NBA Math Hoops was added to the programming about midway through Kyler’s eighth-grade year at Dickinson Academy.
Jhay Levi-Alford, Kyler’s instructor and director of the STEM Scholars program, said NBA Math Hoops has been a useful and popular addition to the program’s curriculum.
‘Being able to show (students) that they can use math in a real-life situation with sports, it’s helped a lot of them.’
— Jhay Levi-Alford, STEM Scholars director
“The NBA Math Hoops program has been huge,” Levi-Alford said. “I have a lot of students wanting to be athletes, a lot of students who want to go into sports. … We wanted to do it, students were all on board, staff was on board, and it’s really good for working on those little math proficiency things, in terms of multiplication, division, fractions, percents, everything.”
He said the game has helped to show students how math concepts can be applied to the real world and to things students are excited about.
“Getting students to see math in real-life situations is huge,” Levi-Alford said. “I have students that ask me all the time, ‘Why are we learning this?’ ‘Why are we doing that?’ Being able to show them that they can use math in a real-life situation with sports, it’s helped a lot of them. Especially Kyler.”
Kyler said as soon as the program was introduced, he was on board. He was one of a handful of students who recorded a video to apply for a spot in the Global Championship.
“It was basically me explaining how much I like math and how I like basketball, and those two things put together,” Kyler said, adding that good behavior and sportsmanship also played a part in who was chosen.
While in New York, Kyler and his fellow competitors explored the city, met professional basketball players and watched the NBA draft.
It was a “huge deal” to have a student perform so well in the first year of the game’s inclusion in STEM Greenhouse’s programming, said Levi-Alford.
“It was extremely cool,” he said. “(Kyler) represented his school, his community, our program and our staff very well. We’re super excited that he was able to have that opportunity.”
The STEM Scholars program is expanding to more GRPS schools in 2025-26, which means more students will get to experience NBA Math Hoops during the coming school year.
“Hopefully Kyler won’t be the last one to go to New York City for Math Hoops,” Levi-Alford said.
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