Basketball. On German terms.

Leverkusen and @NBA royalty at the BayArena, welcome @Dschrempf! 🏀😍

Leverkusen and NBA royalty at the BayArena, welcome @Dschrempf! 🏀😍

In the mid-1990s, Detlef Schrempf was one of the most beloved athletes in Seattle. A three-time NBA All-Star, the smooth-shooting big man on Sonics teams that won 60 games a year and packed 17,000 screaming fans into the building every night. He was a German kid who'd moved to Seattle for his senior year of high school, fallen in love with the place, and come back to star for its team. So when he got the chance to give back, he took it. In 1996, Schrempf and his wife Mari started the Detlef Schrempf Foundation, built around a celebrity golf tournament and a fundraising gala. Their focus was simple: help children and families in need across the Pacific Northwest. The first year, they raised $40,000. "We were young and dumb when we started," Schrempf admitted. They didn't even have a plan. It just grew. Then, in 2008, the unthinkable happened. The Sonics were sold and moved to Oklahoma City. Seattle lost the team Schrempf had starred for, the very platform his fame and his fundraising had been built on. He assumed that was the beginning of the end for the foundation. "When we started this, the Sonics were the hottest ticket in town. We thought that when there was no more team, people would shift their money to other causes." They didn't. For nine more years after the team was gone, the sponsors and the donors kept showing up. Not for a franchise. For him, and for the kids. Many of them just wanted to be in a room with someone who represented a Seattle era they still loved and missed. By the time Schrempf hosted his final gala in 2017, after 24 years, the foundation had raised roughly $19 to $20 million for Northwest children's charities, money that flowed to Seattle Children's, autism centers, clinics for kids with disabilities, and programs that get children with special needs into the outdoors. He earned the Paul Allen Award for Citizenship for it. The team Detlef Schrempf played for got taken away from Seattle. The good he built with it never left.