ST. CHARLES – When it comes to basketball, Kent Payne knows more about the sport than most people will ever forget.

When it comes to writing a book, not so much. At least not initially.

“I started out without any frame of reference other than reading about writing a memoir,” said Payne, a St. Charles resident and the Director of Athletics and Wellness at Elgin Community College.

Though more versed in pick-and-rolls than past participles, that didn’t stop Payne from writing a memoir, “A Family’s Journey With Hoops, Life and ALS,” about his father’s bout with Lou Gehrig’s Disease and the way his family’s love of sports, particularly basketball, helped navigate a difficult situation.

“This was something I always had in the back of my head,” Payne said. “I wanted to get it all down and share the experiences of my dad’s life, his diagnosis with ALS and the effect it had on us for 17 years.”

Jim Payne was a teacher and football coach at Leyden High School who was inducted into the Illinois High School Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 1992. His induction came two years after his diagnosis with ALS, which itself came just days after Kent and his wife, Sherry, welcomed their oldest child, Cully, to the world. Katlyn and Quinten joined the family later, but they never had a chance to see their grandfather as an athlete and hall of fame football coach.

“My kids, all they saw of my dad was a quadriplegic on life support,” Kent Payne said.

Payne said there were some initial struggles in the writing process – “The first 10 pages sounded like a book report,” he said – but then things started to come together. After starting the book about the same time Quinten was beginning his senior year at St. Charles North in 2012, he completed it in 2014.

“It took me a year and a half to do it. It kind of consumed me,” he said. “After that, I have a new-found respect for writers.”

ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which attacks motor neurons that control muscles, runs in the Payne family. In the book, Kent Payne writes that no male from his father’s side of the family lived past the age of 52 before him. Jim Payne’s father died from ALS when Jim was 17. Jim’s brother Mick died from the disease when Kent was 20 years old.

The book details Jim Payne’s struggles with the disease – coaching Leyden football in 1991 from a motorized scooter, being placed on a ventilator in February 1994 and living in a hospital bed in his home for 14 years until his death in 2007 – how the family dealt with those situations and how Cully, Katlyn and Quinten overcame the heartbreak to play Division I college basketball.

The book was initially released in a digital format (it is available for Amazon Kindle) before Payne did a print run through 48 Hour Books. He wanted to write something that connected with readers, and by all accounts that is exactly what happened.

“I had a great response to it,” Payne said. “I sent it to some doctors and they gave it to their patients. I didn’t have the resources for elaborate marketing. It was all through word of mouth.”