Phil Anastasia: With basketball, these two bring others together

Matt Minoff and Tim Roche were star athletes at Cherry Hill East in the late 1990s through their graduation in 2000.

They went to top colleges. They earned their degrees. They were in prime position to move to New York and join the Wall Street world of high finance and fast-lane living.

But the old friends and former teammates on the Cherry Hill East basketball team also came to the same conclusion: Success in sports and school created opportunities that stretched far beyond bank accounts and corporate climbing.

"I used to get up and my whole mood would be determined by how the stock market was doing in Asia," Roche said. "Now I see things from a completely different perspective."

Roche, 27, lives in Durban, South Africa, and works as finance manager as well a district manager for Peace Players International, a global organization that seeks to improve conditions in troubled parts of the world through basketball and educational programs for children.

Roche learned firsthand about Peace Players when he visited Minoff in Israel in 2007. Minoff, also 27, was one of the founders of the organization's chapter in the Middle East.

"It's funny, when Tim came over it was the first time we were getting Israeli kids and Palestinian kids together," Minoff said. "It was our first joint practice, and we had pizza for them afterward.

"It was the coolest thing, seeing them interact just like normal kids."

Roche, who was working for J.P. Morgan at the time, said he became instantly "jealous" of his friend. He also began to question his own path in life, at least as a young man with few responsibilities.

Roche and Minoff took different routes to the same place.

Minoff played basketball for four years at Yale, then went to Israel to play in a professional league. While there, Minoff became involved in the ground floor of Peace Players' efforts to establish programs in that tumultuous part of the world.

"I had the mind-set that I wanted to play pro basketball in Israel," Minoff said. "But once I was there I could see the need for the kind of program that Peace Players has in other parts of the world.

"Sean [Tuohey, who founded Peace Players in 2001] tried to recruit me when I was in Yale to go to South Africa. I spent a lot of time in Israel researching things and developing an operational plan, and in year two I was there to help launch it."

Peace Players' mission is to use "basketball to unite and educate children and their communities," according to its Web site. The organization has chapters in Northern Ireland, South Africa, the Middle East, Cyprus, and New Orleans and has worked with 45,000 children over the last six years.

"There's something about getting your hands dirty and getting involved that is so rewarding," Roche said.

Roche went to work on Wall Street after graduating from Michigan in 2004. He was ready for change after seeing Minoff in Israel and determined to make a move after the financial meltdown of the last couple of years.

"I looked at myself and said, 'What are you doing?' " Roche said. "When would I have another opportunity to do something like this?"

Roche said "the next thing I knew," he was on a 20-hour flight to South Africa. He has been there since January, working with Peace Players to establish after-school programs in primary schools in the KwaZula-Natal region of the country.

"I've never enjoyed a job so much," Roche said. "Every afternoon, I get to meet with a bunch of happy kids who are so excited to see us and so appreciative. Every day I get asked if I played in the NBA."

Minoff followed the same path as Roche, in the reverse order. He spent two years working for Peace Players in Israel. He returned to the United States, worked for Allen & Co., an investment bank in New York, and recently became president of Nabbr, a young company that specializes in publishing online videos.

"I played on teams my whole life," Minoff said. "I guess when you play a lot of sports like Tim and I did, you tend to look at things from that standpoint. You get older and you try to take that team attitude and expand it out to other things.

"That's what we were able to do with Peace Players. We got an opportunity to use sports as part of something much larger and much more important."