Dillon Brooks says his toughness did not come from a training plan or a highlight reel. It came from summers in Nova Scotia, where basketball games with his cousins turned rough fast and where being the youngest in a big family meant proving himself every day.
Brooks said he grew up in Mississauga, but his family story runs through Atlantic Canada. His mother’s side is from New Brunswick, while his father’s side comes from a small town in Nova Scotia, where his dad and uncles were born in East Preston. He said East Preston was founded about 200 years ago and has fewer than 1,000 people. His dad and uncles worked in the concrete business, building driveways and sidewalks, and Brooks said he spent every summer there growing up.
That time in Nova Scotia, he said, is where his love of basketball really started. Brooks described Vince Carter’s rise as a force that was “going crazy” and helping shine a light on Canada. He said he and his cousins played pickup games outside, but the competition quickly turned into tackle basketball and then WWE-style wrestling. There were 12 cousins in all, and as the youngest, he said he wanted to show that he was a dog so he could move up in the family hierarchy.
Brooks tied even his earliest memories to that competitive environment. He said that when he was about 3 or 4, his dad and uncles used to throw him in the air as a child — “You know that game you play when you’re a kid, where you have your dad throw you way up in the air and then he catches you?” — and that he once came home from summer with a messed-up shoulder for a whole month when he was about 6. His mother took him to a doctor, who looked at it and said, “Yeah, that’s a separated shoulder. How many days has he been like this?”
The profile, published as a first-person piece by The Players' Tribune, frames Brooks’ family roots and childhood summers as the foundation for the edge he has carried into basketball. The contradiction in his own account is that the environment he describes as rough and physical also sounds, in his telling, like the place where his game and identity were built first. For Brooks, Nova Scotia was not a backdrop. It was the proving ground.
