Double-Teaming Pump Twins Run Vibrant Camp

You’re a college basketball coach and you’ve just been cornered by a precocious kid with a nonstop rap. You listen for 10 minutes as he explains how to defense Michael Jordan. Then you excuse yourself. But halfway across the hotel lobby, you bump into the kid again. While you wonder how he caught up so quickly, another one suddenly appears, an exact replica: the same frizzy, close-cropped red hair, the same beefy forearms, the same overabundance of freckles, the same machine-gun, in-your-face oratory.

What’s going on? You’re being double-teamed by the Pump Twins, Dana and David of Northridge, natural-born schmoozers who were familiar faces--or face--at basketball clinics, tournaments and conventions long before they began to shave. Now only 22, they’ve been running a summer basketball camp for six years, using high school and college coaches old enough to be their father. Two years ago, they started a high school scouting service that now has 150 subscribers. Their management style: energy, intensity and doggedness.

“They’re the most aggressive young people I’ve ever seen,” says Sonny Vaccaro, who oversees Nike’s basketball promotions and is a powerful force in college basketball.

Vaccaro had the double-team experience when he first met the Pumps a few years ago. He ran into David on the East Coast. He flew to the West Coast and ran into Dana. Or maybe it was the other way around. Regardless, they were relentless, all over him like a pair of arm-waving Michael Coopers. “They’re almost omnipresent,” Vaccaro says. “I can’t tell them apart. So I just call them the Pumpers.”

While their personas overwhelmed him, he befriended the likable kids--taking them out to dinner with other coaches, welcoming them into the fraternity--and their ability impressed him. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see them running the whole scouting service for the NBA one of these days,” says Vaccaro, who founded the Dapper Dan Classic, the premier all-star game for high school players, 25 years ago.

The Pumps also have their own all-star game, the Dana Pump Discovery Classic in the spring. Dana, an assistant coach at Valley College, puts his name on the all-star game and the camp and David operates the scouting service. That’s to satisfy the NCAA, which considers dual ownership a conflict of interest. But the Pumps are such Xeroxes of one another (their phone voices are indistinguishable), it would be practically impossible to know which Pump is doing what. Even Dana admits:

“David can’t be involved in the camp, but who can really tell?”

On this day recently, the only way to distinguish the brothers is by the color of their shirts: Dana in white, David aqua. Both are running around at the camp, which took place for five days on the wooded grounds of Campbell Hall High in Studio City. When they started in 1984 at Northridge Park--on $1,000 earned doing odd jobs--the Pumps had 37 kids, some older than themselves; this year: about 200 boys from 7 to 17 and four girls.

“The hardest thing back then,” David says, “was ‘Who is Dana Pump?’ We had to build a name. Parents don’t send kids to any camp.”

From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., the two indoor gyms and four outdoor courts at Campbell Hall are a sea of basketballs. Tall men teaching small boys the fundamentals. Drills on footwork and fast breaks. This isn’t a camp where kids make lanyards and take nature hikes. It’s strictly hoops. A staff of 25--including assistant coaches from 15 Division I colleges--stands beneath towering eucalyptus trees and “builds habit patterns,” says Mike Dunlap, the new head coach at Cal Lutheran.

Dana Pump is constantly on the move, carrying a bundle of papers as he circles the camp. David mostly observes. Mostly, that is, until his brother barks, “I want two more trash cans put out. And get some more Gatorade.” Then Dana goes off to find a Band-Aid for a kid’s blister.

“I think our top 15 players can go against any camp in California,” David says after hauling a trash can. “Our younger kids are the most phenomenal I’ve ever seen. We’ve got this 6-8 eighth-grader, Alex Lopez from Granada Hills, and Tracy Murray’s little brother. A kid and his father even drove out from Vegas to be here.”

Over the years, about 10 alumni have gone on to major colleges, including Adonis Jordan at Kansas and Mitchell Butler at UCLA.

The Pumps may eventually get rich from basketball, but right now they still have to live at their parents’ home. “We’ve never made any substantial amount of money on the camps,” says David, whose father owns a wrecking company. They only charge $110--compared to about $500 for Magic Johnson’s camp--and let about half of the kids in free, they say.

“They’ve been very good to kids from depressed areas,” says William Borders, who brought 11 players from the Compton area and took off a week from work as a recreation director to help coach at the camp.

Dana checks his digital watch--the one that stores 50 phone numbers--and trots over to a court. Youngsters are simulating game conditions under the watchful gaze of 6-8 Mel Braxton, a former Long Beach State player. “You know how hard it is to motivate little kids like these?” Pump asks. “Their attention span is two seconds. But Mel is on them. He’s been my director for five years. We played against each other in intramurals at College of the Canyons. I killed him. Isn’t that right, Mel?”

Braxton rolls his eyes. “Yeah, right,” he says sarcastically.

Pump sees an 11-year-old boy with braces. “This kid’s been to five basketball camps this summer. Five camps,” Dana says in disbelief. True, Noel Bloom, who lives in Hidden Hills, has already attended Magic’s camp, USC’s, Michael Cooper’s and Pat Riley’s. He probably acquired enough basketball wisdom this summer to coach the Clippers. So how does he rate the camps?

“Magic’s was very good,” Bloom says enthusiastically. “It was a sleep-over camp and they worked you very hard. USC’s was a lot like this camp: work stations in the morning, games in the afternoon. Michael Cooper’s was very good. He stressed defense for the first few days. Pat Riley’s camp?” He shook his head. “I’ve been going there for four years. How many times can you listen to the same stories? Like the joke about the window-washer.”

(The window-washer joke, which has nothing to do with voyeurism, is too long to repeat, but it’s basically a parable about believing in yourself.)

What about Pump’s camp? “I love this camp,” Bloom says. “I’d call it pretty awesome.”

Pam Weiner has another name for it: “a family-operated y’all-come-camp,” she says, referring to the twins’ penchant for letting kids in at no charge. As their business partner, Weiner, who has a law degree, has to cope with their largess. In 1987, she and the Pumps incorporated as Double Pump, Inc. She provides the business savvy and keeps them focused.

“We have a deal: I don’t coach and they don’t write checks,” says Weiner, a 42-year-old Tarzana divorcee who met the Pumps a few years ago when they coached her son’s flag football team.

Weiner serves $1-a-slice pizza to the hungry kids at the camp, but her main responsibility at Double Pump, Inc., is the twins’ scouting service, the twice-monthly (during the season) California Cage Report. The Pumps come up with the information “and I put it together,” she says. It contains the standard information on a high school prospect plus his or her phone number, grade-point average, SAT scores and an analysis by the Pumps.

The brothers are basketball junkies, hooked since age 10 or 11 (as babies, they double-dribbled). “We love basketball,” David says. “We could watch it 365 days a year.” They almost do. Over a year, they see hundreds of high school games. During the season, they watch at least two or three a day. But in the summer, when basketball camps sprout like mushrooms, they go into a feeding frenzy. Last July, Dana saw more than 250 games at all-star camps. “Basketball is all I do,” he says.

Starters at Bel-Air Prep--”5-10 power forwards,” is how David describes them--they both made all-league. But their biggest honor, David says coyly, is “making the all-lobby team” at the NCAA Final Four. They have been to the past four tournaments, working the hotel crowds like seasoned pros, going to dinner with big-time head coaches (at one memorable gathering were Jerry Tarkanian, P. J. Carlesimo and Lute Olson).

Without question, the brothers say, the novelty of being red-headed twins has helped them in the basketball world. “Everybody knows us,” David says. But their willingness to work hard also has paid off. The first of dozens of calls from college coaches and recruiters comes in about 6:30 a.m. It’s not until 2 a.m. that the twins finally get to sleep. They also have to juggle their business with a full load of classes at Cal State Northridge. Seniors, they’re majoring in commercial recreation, which teaches them, among other things, how to run a camp.

During this summer’s camp, the twins’ professor in the Department of Leisure Studies and Recreation, Bob Winslow, paid a visit to Campbell Hall to check up on them.

“This definitely is impressive,” he says, gazing at the flurry of organized activity, watching Dana hustle to keep everything on schedule. At CSUN, Winslow had given the twins Bs in “Introduction to Recreation Program Planning,” but they evidently paid more attention in class than he had thought. “School is not their main interest,” he says. “This is.”