PEMBERVILLE, Ohio — The village of Pemberville is usually pretty quiet. But if you make it into town on a Monday summer night just before sunset, it's a marked difference.
Hundreds of community members gather at Pemberville Park in lawn chairs and on golf carts to watch pickup basketball.
'Monday Night Lights' is the startup basketball league in town, and it's gotten quite popular fast. The league is the brainchild of Pemberville friends Drew Kachmarik and Quinten Farmer.
"Initially, this kind of started out as a joke, just something with your friends to get people out here to just have fun," said Farmer, a 2023 graduate of Eastwood High School. "Drew Kachmarik, he said 'if we're gonna do this thing, we gotta do it now.'"
Kachmarik, a rising senior at Eastwood, credits the explosion in popularity to the league's Instagram page.
"[We] just started posting on Instagram," Kachmarik explained. "Teams got with us, and we got it rolling."
The league consists of about a dozen teams consisting of three players. Teams win by being the first to reach 21 points, or whichever team has the most points after ten minutes.
Two games run simultaneously on each end of the park's basketball court. Kachmarik and a team of others keep track of major statistics including points, rebounds, and assists.
The league wrapped up its regular season on Monday and will commence its postseason playoffs, concluding with a championship.
Kachmarik and Farmer said 200 people attended the games on July 1, and an estimated 300 people attended the July 9 games, with many showing up an hour before the scheduled 9 p.m. start time.
Neither friend could've predicted the number of people who would come to a pickup basketball game late at night.
"I don't know why people want to come out to Pemberville," Farmer joked. "I guess it's just the community that I have behind me. It's just great people. Could not have picked a better town to do this. To be honest, I'm so grateful. Basketball is a sport that everyone loves."
Community members love it so much they now have sponsorships, T-shirts, and a streaming partner. Star players from other schools such as Rossford, Otsego, and Bowling Green also formed teams in the league.
Even local politicians like Randy Gardner can be seen getting shots up.
"Yeah, it's crazy," Kachmarik said. "We thought it was just going to be the Eastwood community. It ended up being the cities around us, the conference, the NBC. Even older people who graduated already. Now, it's taken off. "
The guys said even as big as it is now, they think it'll get even bigger next year.
"Next year we're looking to have 10 more teams in it, so we're looking at 20 to 30 teams [for 2025]," Kachmarik. "I know next year we're thinking about getting the court re-done, maybe having it a little bit bigger, and just taking off from there. We have sponsorships (handling) the money with us, buying our T-shirts and stuff, but we're not really making money off it. We're just having it for the community and just taken off with it."
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