NEW PALESTINE — A decade ago when Mike Gizzi helped launch the New Palestine Heat, the community’s youth basketball feeder program, his goal was to assist in the forward trajectory of high school hoops in southern Hancock County.
Now, a year after relinquishing the reigns of the New Palestine Heat, Gizzi still has the same mission — and so does his immediate family.
In his second summer with D1 Indiana, an AAU hoops organization based in Noblesville, Gizzi and his father-in-law, Bruce Haynes, coached up four future New Palestine Dragons newcomers, along with a trio of talented incoming Zionsville High School freshmen and another from Greensburg.
The eight-player team collectively won the 2025 Platinum Division Bearcat Classic in Cincinnati this off-season, but the highlight for the group unfolded in Orlando, Fla. this month.
The D1 Indiana 2025 squad placed third overall out of 34 teams at the AAU Nationals in the 15U division, finishing 7-1 with Gizzi serving as head coach and Haynes assisting.
The five-day annual event is normally played at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando where the 2020 NBA Bubble was conducted, but it was instead held at the Orange County Convention Center this year on 12 different courts.
The D1 Indiana 2025 team made its mark on each of them, running out to 6-0 record before narrowly losing to eventual champion City Rocks of Flint, Mich., 71-68, in the semifinals. They ended the tournament with a 61-58 victory over Texas Lone Star Red.
“We actually played up in 15U second division, which is playing against incoming sophomores and my kids are incoming freshmen,” said Gizzi, who has coached the team for two seasons. “If you get into one of those tournaments you hope things click, you get a good draw, you get a good pool, and the kids played their best basketball.
“The kids were excited about Orlando. It was a big stage. A lot of teams from all over the country. There was a team from Australia there, which made the experience all that more intriguing.”
Even more interesting were the players involved.
The team’s leading scorer was 6-foot, shooting guard Julius Gizzi, Mike’s son, and the team’s starting point guard was 5-8 Moses Haynes, Mike’s nephew. Both are Bruce Haynes’ grandchildren with Moses being the son of Noah Haynes, who led the state in scoring as a senior at Frontier in 1989-90 when he played for his father.
“Moses and Julius are best friends and they have been playing basketball on the same team for the last eight years,” Gizzi said. “Those two know each other better than most husbands and wives. It’s fun to watch. In my humble opinion, he is one of the best 2025 point guards in the entire area.”
Moses’ basketball talent comes naturally, much like Julius, with Bruce Haynes spending 17 years as a varsity coach in his career and actively serving as an assistant coach for his daughter, Sarah (Haynes) Gizzi, who is the head girls varsity coach at New Palestine.
Bruce Haynes coached the New Palestine boys team from 1990-95, and Mike Gizzi, a former professional player overseas, is currently a boys varsity assistant coach for the Dragons. Sarah Gizzi was an Indiana All-Star at New Palestine in 1994 and still owns the school’s career-scoring record for girls basketball.
Mike and Sarah Gizzi’s oldest son, Maximus, is playing at Marian University after setting New Palestine’s boys career-scoring record before graduating in 2019-20, while their daughter, Isabella is a standout incoming junior point guard for the Dragons’ girls team.
Noah Haynes went on to play at Indiana State after high school, and both Mike and Sarah starred at LaSalle University where the two first met before embarking on their on-going family basketball journey.
“Overall, it’s really fun. Sarah and I both played basketball all of our lives. We met in college. We were both captains of our college teams, and we have been immersed in basketball our entire lives, and it’s fun to see our kids enjoy it and have success,” Gizzi said.
“They seem to generally love the game. They put a lot of extra time in on their own, which makes our jobs as coaches so much easier. It’s fun. We have a lot of arguments and there’s a lot of comparison and heated discussions in the house for sure, but one of the proudest things I can say about my kids is they are huge fans and supporters of each other.”
That tradition will continue for at least four more seasons, it seems, as Julius and Moses will begin their Dragons’ high school careers in 2021-22 along with D1 Indiana 2025 teammates and New Palestine natives Ben Slagley, who stands at 6-4, and 6-0 Alex Guhl.
Zionsville’s Drew Snively, Jackson Tielker, Max Phenicie and Greenburg’s Jack McKinsey completed the D1 Indiana 2025’s AAU roster.
“This group is in a great position going into high school. They’re all going to be involved in JV and varsity basketball as freshmen. They’ve all played 50 games the last two or three summers,” Gizzi said. “And in this particular group, I have Julius and three other New Pal kids. All from my eighth-grade middle school team and all four of them will be a huge part of New Pal basketball going forward because they’re great kids, great players and great athletes but also because of these developmental experiences from the summer.”
The future Dragons initially honed their games with Gizzi in the middle school program, which he stepped away from last season, and they showed their future promise in Orlando.
The quartet pushed City Rocks until the final buzzer, trailing by two points with one minute remaining before losing. To reach 6-0, the group rallied back from a 16-point deficit against North Carolina Sand Hills Machine Basketball 2024 to win big 63-53.
“We were down 16. The team came out and jumped us, and our kids never gave up and fought back. That was maybe one of the funniest and best wins of my coaching career. It was amazing,” Gizzi said. “One of the most amazing comebacks ever. For a group of kids to completely flip the script. I think, in the third quarter, we held them to two points.”
The team’s 7-1 finale was reminiscent of the past for Gizzi, who coached his son Maximus’ Indiana Elite team in Orlando a few years back, but they weren’t able to place in the top-three.
Maximus’ AAU team included Blackford’s Luke Brown (Stetson University), New Palestine’s Dawson Eastes (Hanover), Pendleton Heights’ Tristan Ross (Hanover) and Greensburg’s Andrew Welage (Wright State).
“I took Maximus’ group there five years ago because I coached that group, and he had a bunch of Division I kids on his team and his team went 6-2 and finished seventh out of 68 teams,” Gizzi said. “It was great experience, so as the coach, I decided to do that with Julius’ group.”
The result bodes well for Dragons’ basketball and other sports with Julius competing both on the court and as a quarterback during football season. Moses is also a tennis player, while Slagley, who weighs 225 pounds, and Guhl are football players as well.
“I almost can’t put it into words. To be able to replicate the situation with Julius that we had with Maximus is incredible. Maximus was on a very good AAU team that I was fortunate enough to coach, and Julius’ team is turning into something very similar,” Gizzi said.
“My father-in-law is my assistant coach. He was my assistant coach with Maximus’ group, too. I coached that group for four years. I’m in my third year with Julius’ group already. To be able to go down to such a big, highly-recognized, national tournament and have that kind of success with two kids in two different time periods; I feel very lucky.”
The fortune could spill over the next few years as the four up-and-coming Dragons continue to develop and potentially contribute at the varsity level.
“That’s the goal. You have to develop at a younger age and build skills and build the love of the game, so you can have those fun moments in high school,” Gizzi said. “When I started the New Pal Heat 10 years ago that feeder program is where Ben, Moses, Julius and Alex and even Maximus started playing travel basketball. It’s starting to payoff a little bit. Julius and this class is just another product of that environment in trying to build basketball.”
