Meet Evan: The 9 Year Old With Down Syndrome Whose Reaction To A Made Basket Will Make Your Day

With a little help from Kelci Marosites, a young fan earns an ETSU T-Shirt pic.twitter.com/0MDnfiV8uw

— ETSU WBB (@ETSU_WBB) November 1, 2016

FTW- Evan Brown is 9 years old and has down syndrome. His family are big fans of East Tennessee State University’s women’s basketball team.

They decided to attend an open practice that was being held for fans where they got the opportunity to meet players and coaches. At the practice, the team’s head coach noticed how loudly Evan was rooting for the team and invited him onto the court.

He scored a basket with the help of player Kelci Marosites and his reaction to was epic.



I'll be honest. After the first three seconds of this video I was going to sarcastically rag on that ETSU player for brushing up on her fundamentals (in classic women's basketball fashion) by laying the ball up off the glass and finishing the play instead of letting the kid get a few more shots at making it himself. Then Evan went into full celebration mode and brought a rare, unfamiliar warmth to my cold, lifeless heart. Unfortunately in doing so he put a big ass smile on my face and made it next to impossible for me to be try to be funny about this sequence of events. In fact, the only joke I can even think of after watching that clip in full is that Evan enjoyed assisting on a basket more than I have ever enjoyed a single fucking thing in my entire life, and that's really more of an indictment of myself than anything else.

In all seriousness, I'm a little bit jealous. There is no amount of adult happy that matches "nine year old kid that's so excited that he doesn't think twice before kissing strange older women on the cheek" happy. So props to the ETSU Women's Basketball Team and their head coach for making this happen, because it clearly made one afflicted little boy's day/month/year/life more than they possibly could have imagined when they first invited him on to the court.