It’s going on 10 p.m. on a Wednesday night in early summer, and Jeff Razore and Jason Correa-Wood are nearly halfway through a 45-minute trip back up Interstate 5. The two Bellevue residents and local high school alums will be back to their day jobs Thursday morning but right now, those take a back seat to something far more important. That something is Seattle Swish, the AAU basketball program they founded earlier this year.

Starting an AAU basketball team is nothing new, but Seattle Swish is. Razore, a Bellevue alum and football coach with the Wolverines and Correa-Wood, who attended Eastside Catholic before graduating from Interlake, want to change the face of AAU hoops.

The plan to start a program that broke the mold had been brewing in Razore and Correa-Wood’s minds for some time. They wanted to lay the foundation for a team that operated outside the traditional confines of “pay to play”; they wanted a program that did more for kids than conduct a talent search for the next blue chip prospect to stamp their own name to.

“After studying the landscape of AAU basketball ever since I played, I realized how important it is to establish a core group of guys that are all willing to buy into your system and believe in your vision,” Razore said. “When the season was over, they [other AAU programs] just let the kids go.”

Playing for and then coaching alongside Bellevue High School head football coach Butch Goncharoff for nearly a decade from age 10 gave Razore a first-hand look at how much his mentor cared for players as people, not just athletes. After studying how his mentor molded the Bellevue football program, Razore knew any basketball program he was affiliated with wasn’t going to have kids merely renting space until someone with more talent came along.

With that mission in mind, he founded Swish and immediately tabbed his friend Correa-Wood, who has several years of youth coaching experience, as the head coach. They began to brand the program immediately by contacting friends around the area who could help with outfitting the program and other ground-level projects by making donations to Swish, which is registered as a non-profit organization. All they had to do after that was find players.

Anyone who has ever tried out for a competitive sports team knows the drill.

Come to the field or gym, take a number to be identified by and do your best to stand out amongst a group of dozens if not hundreds of others vying for the same prize. But that isn’t Razore and Correa-Wood’s style. Instead of herding the brightest 13-and-under players from around the area into a gym to decide who was worthy of a spot, the two men decided to gather their players through a more traditional approach. More like the way it was done before internet databases ranked youngsters as early as fourth grade.

Rodney Hughey, who grew up in Detroit and played with the likes of the NBA’s Jalen Rose, Chris Weber and even Magic Johnson, has 10 children who all participated in youth athletics at various levels. Five of them have since attained a Bachelor’s Degree. Three more are currently in pursuit of their Bachelor’s and the youngest two, including Swish point guard Rakeem, have yet to reach high school.

“My experience with Swish has been word of mouth,” Hughey said. “Coach Jeff knew some coaches in the AAU division and he just asked about certain kids, about good kids basically.” Correa-Wood would bring a few kids at a time to a Boys and Girls Club in Federal Way for open gym to play and run through some drills with Razore and himself.

“We started out with two kids,” Correa-Wood said. While auditioning kids in such small groups became a lengthy process (several months), having players in a more controlled, personable setting allowed the two coaches to evaluate not only talent, but character and drive as well. The two coaches tapped all of their resources to find players- connecting with other AAU coaches, friends, friends of friends and even cold-calling parents to find out who wanted to take advantage of the unique opportunity they were offering. Eventually a group of 13 came together.

“It took about seven or eight months to get the kids we wanted to get,” Correa-Wood said. Finding a cohesive mix both on and off the court was crucial to the mission of Swish and led to an eclectic group of youngsters coming together. Players from as far south as Spanaway and as far east as Redmond helped fill out the roster, which includes kids who attend private, parochial schools and others who study at some of the more raw middle and junior high schools around Puget Sound. Once a few months ago, Razore got an urgent call from one of his players who comes from a particularly difficult family situation. The player said he was in the process of leaving home for good. Eventually, due in large part to the respectful and trusting relationship the two built through Swish, Razore was able to persuade the player to return home.

That is just one of the reasons that even though each of the players with Swish also play for other select basketball teams, nothing compares to what Razore and Correa-Wood are building.

“The atmosphere [of AAU basketball] is like a jungle, that’s the unique thing about the Swish situation,” Hughey said. “He could have researched and investigated and went out and grabbed a bunch of blue-chippers, but he didn’t approach it that way. When you sat down to the table with Jeff and Jason, they made sure to get good kids together so you wouldn’t have all those attitudes and they did that with the parents also.” Jennifer Anderson, whose son Taggart became one of the first players to join Swish through a relationship with Correa-Wood at the Pro Club where he works, was immediately impressed with the program’s emphasis on character building and off-court growth.

“At the end of the day, they want to be a part of these kids lives in the long term,” Anderson said. There’s no question that for the coaches, this is a long-term investment both physically and emotionally.

“If you’re on my team, I want to make sure you go to college and go to college in an environment that suits you,” Razore said. “I want them to have relationships with each other 10, 20 years from now, similar to what Jason and I have.”

The team is no doubt full of talented players, but the purpose for the coaches isn’t to churn out Division-I talent or become the next superstar prospect factory, that part will take care of itself. Whether college means playing at a Division III school because it offers a preferred major field of study or having the opportunity to take their game to the big stage at a Division I program, it’s all the same to Razore and Correa-Wood. Contrary to most other AAU programs that require a solidified time commitment in order to be selected, Razore and Correa-Wood don’t even care if playing in college means playing basketball. Keeping as many doors open to the future is critical for the coaches mission and whether one of their players chooses football, track and field, baseball or basketball, it’s all the same to them. As long as a college education is involved.

“It’s important to look at it outside of basketball,” Razore said. “Our guys are 13 years old, we need to make sure that when they are juniors and seniors in high school, they are prepared for college on and off the floor. That’s something our program values.”

Another thing the program values is making sure anyone who is deserving can be a part of the program, regardless of their family’s economic situation. Razore is somewhat tepid in discussing the particulars, but suffice to say sponsorship and his own generosity have created a program devoid of the huge financial commitment other AAU and select programs require from participants. Hughey was not shy in discussing the matter. One of his sons has played for a NBA player from the area and while that player purchased uniforms and shoes for the team, “that wasn’t their stuff,” according to Hughey. Once their time with the team came to a close, all the gear, including shoes and uniforms, went back to the program to be used by the next person through the revolving door. Despite his willingness to eliminate financial hardship as a hurdle to being a member of Swish, Razore made sure to never overstep his boundaries.

“He never came out like “I’m here to save your kid,” Hughey said. Razore is quick to point out the contributions of the team’s sponsors and parents, saying that his primary goal is to, “”Establish a mentoring network that features an elite basketball program, gives our players a stong foundation to build upon as they strive to reach the next level and beyond.”

While the two coaches are forward-thinking in their approach to AAU hoops, they’re also not naive. Of the three tournaments Swish played in since coming together in early 2011, they captured championships in two of them. The tournament that ended without a title was comprised of teams from an older age bracket. At a prominent national tournament in Las Vegas two weeks ago, Swish went unbeaten in pool play, taking down a Calif. Bay Area select program known as the Oakland Soldiers in its opening round game. The Soldiers boast a deep and impressive list of alumni, including dozens of Division I players and NBA talent like Drew Gooden, Matt Barnes and Eddie House.

The win over the Soldiers’ 13U squad was a huge notch in the belt for the up and coming Swish program and had other teams at the tournament taking notice of the new kids from around the Sound. The tournament titles and the victories in Las Vegas helped further drive home the point that for Razore and Correa-Wood, success on the court is still a focal point. It just isn’t the only focal point.

“At the end of the day, all my kids are going to be able to play the game really well,” Razore said. “But what’s more important to me is the fact that when the game’s over, they have a bigger impact in the community and in society than they do on the court.”