Twenty-year-old Jadin Aviles grew up inside La Liga del Barrio. Founder Raymond Alvarez remembers him in his own words.
He was nine, maybe ten years old, the first time he walked into our gym.
We were playing out of Aspira in those days, and the boy who showed up was friendly, respectful, quick to learn, easy to coach — with a smile the people who met him still describe today. What stays with me, in the end, is that the smile never changed.
From that first season until the day, we lost him, Jadin Aviles was, in all the ways that matter, the same person he’d always been: that happy kid with the beautiful smile and, I’ll just say it, an enormous soul. The kid never changed.
Jadin was twenty when he passed this past May, killed in a crash while riding his moped in North Philadelphia. The investigation is still open. Hundreds came to his funeral, and the neighborhood gathered to release balloons in his memory. For us, the loss cut especially deep, because Jadin never simply passed through our league. He grew up inside it. And so did the story of who he was.
To understand Jadin, you first have to understand how we give out our MVP award, which is to say, not the way most leagues do. We’re not known for handing a kid MVP just because he’s a fantastic athlete who scores all these points. For us, the honor goes to the whole person: the teammate, the leader, the kid I’d be proud to see my own children follow. It’s for the athlete and the human being at once.
Jadin won it when he was eleven or twelve, back when we were still at Aspira. At the time, he was averaging fewer than ten points a game. On the stat sheet, he was nobody’s leading scorer. But we knew there was a lot more to him than his game. We knew what type of person he was. Jadin fit the bill. He always had.
And then, about a year ago, came the night that revealed what had been there all along. In a single game, Jadin scored 46 points. I’m almost certain that’s a league record.
Here is the thing worth sitting with: he could always do that. He simply chose, most nights, to make everyone around him better instead. That night wasn’t some different player suddenly breaking out. It was the same kid, for once turning the dial all the way up, and the rest of the time, keeping it right where his team needed him. That choice, to feed rather than to feast, to lead rather than pad a stat line, was the whole point. It’s the very reason we named him MVP years earlier, in a season when the points weren’t there yet but the person already was.
For most of his years with us, the man on the sideline calling his name was his own father.
Sam came to me and asked if he could coach. I gave him his own son. From then on, every time the season came around, it was Sam coaching Jadin, guiding him as a player and as a son, in the gym and then again at home, where the mentoring never really clocked out. It was a rare kind of gift: a father who got to see his boy from both sides of the whistle, and a son who got to grow up with his coach waiting for him at the dinner table.
The two were so alike it was almost uncanny. Both patient, both soft-spoken. Jadin was practically the image of his father, the same temperament passed straight down. And that patience wasn’t reserved for his son; it was how Sam coached every kid who came through our program. In time, he went on to coach at the high school where Jadin played, and he credits us for helping shape the coach he became.
So when I talk about what we lost in May, I count it twice.
We didn’t only lose Jadin. Sam has stepped away from coaching, and I don’t expect him back any time soon. But we still talk. I keep reaching out, checking in, making sure Jadin’s father is okay.
Jadin’s mother, Emelissa Gonzalez, has spoken publicly about the weight of this loss and the faith the family is leaning on to carry it. In an interview with NBC10’s Isabel Sanchez, she said her heart will forever be shattered. And still, the message she’s offered the community has been one of grace rather than anger, a plea not to let the heartbreak harden into hate, but to hold on to one another, and to God. That’s the family Jadin came from.
We intend to make sure his name endures. At the close of the summer season, on August 15, we’ll hold a tribute game in his honor, with Jadin’s high school team facing our AAU boys. The proceeds will go to support his family. We’re also working alongside Philadelphia VIP, the same organization that helped us become nonprofit years ago, to create a memorial fund in Jadin’s name, with the full blessing of his family.
There will be a scoreboard on August 15, the way there always is. But anyone who knew Jadin understands the number was never the measure of him. For more than a decade in this league, he quietly made the case for a harder, truer kind of greatness.
The kind that shows up in how you treat people, in how you make a team better, in how you carry the same beautiful smile through every season and never once let it change.