I know, I know, I’m late to the party. I just started watching Schitt’s Creek a week or so ago. I’m actually watching it as a Netflix double-feature with another Canadian sitcom, Kim’s Convenience, which is quite funny in and of itself.
But there’s something about Schitt’s Creek that has a connection to the Canadian basketball pro circuit I’ve worked for the past decade.
Hear me out.
In the NBL’s 2013-14 season, there was a franchise in Brampton, Ontario. These were the Brampton A’s, and one of the players on the A’s during that season was Jesse Tipping. Tipping, a 6’5″ shooting guard / small forward, played 33 games, starting three. He scored 70 points that year, mostly from the bench. His brother Jameson Tipping played a longer career in the league, from 2013 to 2017.
But during that time, Jesse Tipping was working with his own side project, Orangeville Prep, a basketball school in Mono, Ontario, near Orangeville. Jamal Murray and Thon Maker are NBA stars who spent their youth at Orangeville Prep.
Now if you have students at a prep school, of course, they need a place to stay and live. So Tipping purchased a nearby motel.
And in 2015, a television production company leased out the hotel, repainted it from the Orangeville Prep colors of red and black to a more TV-friendly white coat … and filmed a TV sitcom about a rich family who were suddenly thrown into bankruptcy and living in a squalid motel.
Yep. The Rosebud Motel is the same building as the home of Orangeville Prep, operated by Jesse Tipping, an alum of the National Basketball League of Canada.
And I write this because the motel is now for sale. It’s being listed at a starting price of $1.56 million. Not bad for a building that produced a couple of NBA stars and a show that dominated the Emmy Awards last year.
Oh, and I might have forgotten to mention that it’s also being used as a filming site for another Netflix series, Umbrella Academy.
Geez, I may need to watch that show as well at some point in time. 😀
Chuck The Writer 