The sign on the side of the road outside of Pine Ridge on Highway 18 that reads, "The Highlite of your Vacation," seems to either be a sly joke or incredible optimism. Either way, it makes you smile.

Nobody's heading to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for vacation. There aren't many, if any, manicured lawns, trimmed hedges or big, pretty houses, despite the immense natural beauty of the area. There aren't any water parks or tourist traps found in much of the rest of western South Dakota, either.

Pine Ridge is what would be described by most economic measures as a depressing place, but that's before you experience the infectious energy radiating off the pavement at Hedlunds Court on a summer night.

Hedlunds is one of many places on the reservation where you can usually find a game, because, while there may be a scarcity of things in Shannon County that consumer culture tells us are nice and desirable, this place knows how to ball like few others - and that's one of the things that make it special.

"It's just huge down here, everybody just looks up to it, I guess," Orrie Brown says while other kids warm up for some 3-on-3 action. Brown, a lithe junior-to-be at Pine Ridge High School with a quick trigger and deep range, doesn't pretend to know why basketball has such a hold on this area, one of the country's poorest. He just knows it does.

"It's the biggest thing down here, I don't know why, but it just seems like everyone, old people, young people, everyone down here, loves it."

There's little doubt about that. From the four high schools on the reservation - Pine Ridge, Red Cloud, Little Wound and Crazy Horse - to the pick-up games and independent tournaments that never seem to end, basketball is the game on the reservation, and there is no close second.

"This isn't meant as a knock on football or anybody associated with football down here, but there will be more people at a seventh-grade basketball game than a high school varsity football game," Red Cloud head coach Matt Rama said. "I coach track in the spring and believe me, there aren't any parents calling me up after a track meet asking me why their kid didn't run the 100 (meters)."

Poverty, tragedy and trying to overcome it all

Basketball has always been a game of the poor - all it takes is a goal and a ball - so it makes sense that it has taken root in Shannon County, the second-poorest county in the United States according to the 2000 census.

"Sometimes the poverty down here just wears on you," Red Cloud head boys' basketball coach Matt Rama said. "It's tough, man. It can be very tough to convince kids that they can escape that."

Rama has helped many of his players over the years at least get started on the right path. He had four members of his 2008 team - Lester Gotheridge, Billy Scott, David Giago and Art Vitalis - go on to Bismarck State in North Dakota and another, point guard Christian McGhee, head to Chadron State. One of Rama's first players at Red Cloud, point guard Mackenzie Casey, is currently working toward his degree at South Dakota State after finishing his playing career for the Jackrabbits.

"Hopefully that helps us get even more into college," Rama said. "We've had pretty good luck lately."

Rama, a Nebraska native who has been living on the reservation for the better part of the past decade, says that the simple fact of being so isolated from any major metropolitan area is another big factor in getting recruited. He cites his current standout, all-state guard Carl Swallow, as a perfect example.

"If Carl played in an urban area somewhere, like if he was down in Omaha, he'd probably already have D-I schools looking at him," Rama said. "As it is, he's under the radar a bit. It was like Mackenzie (Casey) a few years back. SDSU took a chance on him and that was great, but here was a kid who almost averaged a triple-double and was easily one of the best players in the state, but he didn't even make all-state. That was a joke."

Part of the college dilemma is the perception that Native ballplayers just can't cut it - in the classroom, or the proverbial cord that connects them to home.

"It happens," Rama said. "But I think it's a little unfair, too. I mean, if a kid from Stevens or somewhere doesn't pan out and ends up burning a coach a little bit, they don't just swear off recruiting kids from that area."

Arguably the two greatest players to ever come off of the reservation - Willie White and Jesse Heart - were both undone by lackluster academic performance, not an inability to get it done between the lines. "You know, I just think Jess was too lackadaisical about too much stuff," Pastor Leon Matthews, the supervisor of the games at Hedlunds Court, said. "If he would have had somebody making him take care of things, both on and off the court a little more, I think he probably could have played in the NBA."

Heart, a junior college All-American in his first season at Northeast Community College (Neb.) before flunking out of school, may or may not have been good enough for the NBA, but there is little doubt that he could have done more with his prodigious talent than he did. Now, Heart can be found showing off his feathery jump shot and explosive leaping ability all over the reservation and beyond, from an occasional 3-on-3 game at Hedlunds to big money independent tournaments as far away as Florida. The 6-foot-3 guard shows some of the wear and tear of reservation life, arguably the toughest in the United States. The life expectancy on Pine Ridge is a good two decades less than the U.S. average.

"We're just trying to create a safe place these kids can come to, a place where the gangs and the drugs and violence can be left outside," Matthews said of the regular 3-on-3 tournaments held at Hedlunds. "I mean, we've had some gang activity flare up a couple times, but mostly this is one safe place down here that these kids can come to and not have to worry about so much of the stuff they have to worry about, just living every day down here."

Heart is still the same lanky presence he was in high school, especially after coming off of a four-day sun dance, and he displays most of the lift and all of the skill that made him a statewide sensation after dropping 48 points on DeSmet in the 1999 Class A state semifinals.

But, he also displays a grisly reminder of how brutally violent reservation life can be. A scar on the back of his head is the reminder of a baseball-bat attack. "Some hoods tried to take me out," Heart said with a shrug of indifference that itself illustrates how desensitized to that violence he really is. "It was all good, though. They stapled me up (at the hospital) and I walked out."

Heart has an 11-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter who live in Rapid City with their mother, and it's obvious that no matter what people might think of the former all-state selection who played at both Pine Ridge and Little Wound, he's a loving father who is doing right by his kids. He is just starting to escape the questions about what he could have, or should have, done with his abilities on the basketball court, but watching him with his son at Hedlunds, it's obvious that he is, much more importantly, a loving father.

"It's finally starting to ease up a bit," Heart said of the whispers about wasted talent. "I don't hear it all the time, but it's still there a little bit, for sure."

As anybody who has watched Heart get it going can tell you, there's nothing a defender can really do to stop him - even now - when he gets that soft jumper falling, combined with his innate ability to penetrate.

"I still got a little game," he said with the same impish grin that would break across his face when he'd start to heat up in high school. "I might drop 50 on you."

Tom Casey, the longtime KILI radio broadcaster, made his way to Pine Ridge nearly four decades ago, and has enjoyed a long, detailed view of the place. If there's a question about who did what, where and when on a basketball court, 'Crash' is the man who will help you find an answer.

"I came in 1970 and never could bring myself to leave," Tom Casey said, smiling.

He knows the highs and lows that basketball has brought to many in Pine Ridge, witnessing the successes and failures of many of the area's legends. He counts the White-led Pine Ridge team of 1987 that won the Class A state title, the all-around brilliance of SuAnne Big Crow and Heart and the recent successes of the Red Cloud boys and Pine Ridge girls amongst the many highlights.

Tom Casey says that the reservation lost one of its first true role models when Big Crow died on her way to the 1992 Miss Basketball banquet in Huron. The emotion on his face and in his voice when he talks of one of the state's all-time greats is heavy.

"She was such an incredible competitor and person," Tom Casey said. "She was just phenomenal, always doing whatever she could for the youth and the community down here. Her death was a huge blow to the area because she was a great role model who was just beginning to show others what they were capable of. That set a lot of people back, and it still hurts to this day thinking about what she would have done for her people."

Tom Casey has watched as recent graduates from the reservations have gone on to college, and he sees a subtle change in the attitudes and expectations on the reservation, but he admits that there's plenty still left to do.

"You look around and there are all of these NAIA schools and D-II, and now D-I schools, in the region, and you don't see hardly any Native Americans even though basketball is their game. That's a shame, but it's because we haven't done a very good job of preparing these kids for college off the court," Tom Casey said. "There's a tendency, because basketball is so big, to let those that are good players move on in grades and just keep pushing them through when they haven't earned it. And it's not really the kids' fault, they can do the work, it's just that nobody's holding their feet to the fire and keeping them accountable."

Tom Casey knows of what he speaks - his three children all graduated from different schools on the reservation - and the youngest, Mackenzie, went on to play at South Dakota State.

"When he was in fifth or sixth grade he told me that he wanted to play college ball," he said of Mackenzie. "So he had that goal from an early age. That made it a little easier because if something happened I could always remind him of that. I always told my kids that unless you're on your death bed, you're going to school. If you missed the bus, I'll drive you, but you're going to school."

Changing expectations

Red Cloud head coach Matt Rama has been a huge key in changing the attitude at Red Cloud and holding players accountable off the floor. Rama came to Red Cloud seven years ago but points to his own good fortune, the fact that he inherited a senior leader who helped set a direction for the program.

"When I first got here, it was just me and Mackenzie (Casey) in the gym," Rama said. "Then it was me, Mackenzie and Johnny Crow. Then Christian (McGhee) started coming as an eighth-grader and now there will be

12-15 kids in the gym. But it was Mackenzie who started it and really got this thing going in the right direction."

The respect for Casey in the program is evidenced by the fact that McGhee - himself an all-state selection in 2008 - wore Casey's No. 44 throughout his career. Swallow also wanted to wear the number in honor of Casey, but the jersey was too small for him.

Rama's respect for Mackenzie Casey runs as high, or higher, than for any other player he has coached, not just because of his abilities on the floor, but for the example he set for the kids coming up in the program.

"Mackenzie was there for the state tournament (in Sioux Falls in 2008) and spoke to the team before our third-place game," Rama remembered. "It would be one thing if he had gone off to Brookings and played and went to school and never came back, but he always comes back, helping with camps and talking with kids and just being a presence here, somebody who has made it and still comes back to let others know that they can have success, too. That's what makes him special. He really has meant so much to me, the community and this program."

But it's not just at Red Cloud where expectations are heightening. The Pine Ridge girls' program placed all-stater Laura Big Crow in a college program - first at Williston Junior College and then at Mayville State - where she graduated with a degree in Elementary Education. Little Wound's Brice Hornbeck just finished a redshirt season at the University of Mary in Bismarck, N.D. One of Big Crow's teammates from the Thorpes' 2004 state runner-up squad, Christy Webber, went to Dakota Wesleyan before transferring to Chadron State, where she graduated with a degree in Psychology. Webber is back in Pine Ridge, working in child care and taking classes towards her graduate degree, which she hopes to put to use at her alma mater.

"I want to be a high school counselor," Webber said. "I want to be able to help some of those kids make better choices. When I was in high school nobody even helped us get signed up to take the ACTs. I want to help change that."

Webber loves basketball, getting a run in at Hedlunds every now and again, and while she recognizes all the good the game can do, she also sees how unrealistic expectations can create an unhealthy atmosphere.

"So many people down here will see a great player and start talking about how they're going to go to the NBA," Webber said. "But I don't think that people understand just how few people actually do that. And then people will tell a kid, 'No you can't do that,' and all they want to do is prove them wrong and they concentrate all their energy on something that probably isn't going to happen."

Some feel the expectations and mistakes of adults on the reservation all too often end up affecting the kids negatively.

"Down here we end up focusing on adult issues and not the children's issues and their needs," Tom Casey said. "In many of the schools we are more worried about jobs and money and not about the children and the quality of their education. These kids are more than capable of going to college and succeeding, but the adults need to step up and make sure that they're doing their part to make that possible."

Therein lies the biggest challenge, and key, for the future of the Pine Ridge youth. Basketball isn't going anywhere in this place. It is the king of all sports on the reservation and always will be, but it is long past time for the development of the students off the floor to match up with their skills on it.

"We do not have enough parents and interested adults in the community who will put time into organizing, fundraising, coaching or transporting kids for youth activities," Tom Casey said. "Those who do step up, people like Tiny DeCory, tend to get spread very thin between their own job, their family and the work with youth. With all of the distractions and potential problems for kids, we need the adults here to realize that they have to step up and do their part to help the younger generation find its way."

There's little doubt that this proud warrior culture is capable of helping its youth do that.

It just has to tap into the same teamwork and dedication learned from its favorite game.