Anitra Nance (left) posed at halftime with the team captain from East Boston High, Ke’andre Henderson, Mike Rubin, Terrel Williams, captain of Bridgewater Raynham, and Shai-Ann Nance.

Amid the screech of sneakers and resonate bounce of a basketball at the Anthony Perkins Center Dec. 12, Shai-Ann Nance remembered her father.

“To have something in honor of him, and in honor of something that he loved,” she said. “It makes me feel good, and also to be doing something for his school, and giving back makes me feel like we’re living up to his dream.”

Keith Nance, a former player of the year at East Boston High School, died suddenly of a heart attack while playing basketball in 2011. Two years later, in 2013, his family and friends started putting together a basketball tournament to help kick off the high school season.

Proceeds from the tournament, gathered through admission and snack sales, go toward a college scholarship for an East Boston High School student. This year’s recipient, Kevin Sinatra, received $1000 toward his tuition at Suffolk University, where he plans to study government and public relations.

Eric Bradshaw, a Boston Police Officer, donates his time each year to help make the tournament happen.

“We put the tournament together for the last three years to remember him,” Bradshaw said. “He was a phenomenal person. He was a great person, and a great father.”

It was a friendly game, intense at times for the team captains, but overall a warm up for the season to come.

Coach John Rice from Fenway High School was instrumental in getting the teams together to play. In the girls’ championship, Fenway faced Newton North after both teams beat Pope John on Thursday and Friday. The tournament was played over three days, Dec. 10-12.

In the boys division, Bridgewater Raynham beat Academy of the Pacific Rim on Dec. 11, and East Boston beat Cathedral on Thursday to play in the championship.

Mattapan’s Michael Rubin, the head basketball coach at East Boston high school for 25 years, remembered his former student during half time of the boys’ game.

“I was fortunate enough to coach a lot of great ball players during the tenure of my career, but one of the greatest ball players I that I got to coach was Keith Nance,” said Rubin. “He was a wonderful ball player, but more importantly he was a good person. He was a wonderful human being.”

During his high school career, Nance was a lead scorer and his team rarely lost. He very seldom said anything to anybody, but at the end of the game he would always have 30 points, 15 rebounds, four or five blocks, and three or four dunks, Rubin said.

“He was 6-foot-4, and he wore glasses. He didn’t look like he could play the game, but when the game started it was all his,” said Rubin,
Nance worked for his family’s business as a truck driver contracting with the U.S. Postal Service, but he always kept basketball in his life. He helped coach his daughter’s high school team, and would always stand on the sidelines at his children’s games. He played pick up basketball all over the city of Boston, especially in Roxbury’s Washington Park. He also was in an old timer’s league at the Tobin School, which is where he suffered a heart attack. He passed at 44, when his daughter was in the 9th grade, and his son was still in elementary school. Almost 2,000 people attended his funeral.

“We had standing room, blocks and blocks of people waiting to get into the funeral home,” his wife, Anitra Nance said. “I used to consider him a gentle giant. Very hard working man, very family oriented, he was a really good person.”