Two weeks after Michael Montgomery’s father died in 1996 Michael had a dream. He dreamt he was playing a board game with his dad, a huge IU basketball fan. When Michael woke up he wrote it all down. the game, the rules, the play. Then he took a piece of pine and built one, exactly as he had dreamed it. On that day Spot-A-Shot was born.
“Basketball fans love it, game players love it, its quick, its competitive,” says the inventor.
Spot-A-Shot is a board game played with dice. Each player has four basketballs. A player must roll an ‘a’ to get a ball on the court. Rolling a ‘2’ gets that ball into two-point territory. A ‘3’ gets it to three-point territory. A player must move if a die calls for a move and balls can be bumped off court if poor strategy tries to put two of them in the same hole. The plan can become quite intense.
“I've seen people can't get away from it,” says Montgomery, “They'll sit there and play it and play it again and just keep playing it and that's what it does to you.”
The object is to get to the last hole. The free throw line then roll a ‘1’ to get that ball off court. The first player to get all balls off the court wins. Surprisingly most games end up with players neck and neck, each rolling frantically for that last winning point.
“And that's how this game comes out every time,” says Montgomery, “And it don't matter if you and I play it, you and a five year old play it. or me and a 90 year old play it.
Montgomery’s only recently begun to market Spot-A-Shot and he’s attracting some important attention, even a word of encouragement from Bobby Knight himself, his dad’s hero. The games come in any college colors a buyer wants and each is hand built by Montgomery himself, but that may change soon. Mattel Toy Company has bought a copy and is talking about mass production. So this basketball fan may be very close to winning the big game and seeing all his own personal hoop dreams come true.