Westtown School Basketball Provides Life Lessons in a Sports Narrative

We Town

We Town

Just 30 miles from Middle City, a high school basketball team reminds us that sports and values need not be mutually exclusive

Jan. 06, 2017

Take you heard that the ratings for NFL games are mode down this yr? Down, as in double digits down. The league, under the watchful eye of Commissioner Roger Goodell, he of the $31 one thousand thousand annual salary, is taking steps to try and reverse the rapid slide, including trying to speed upwardly games by airing less advertising.

Good luck. I suspect that sports fans are leaving the NFL—and much of pro sports, for that thing—for deeper reasons. Also oft, the games no longer square with our values. This season, the NFL proved in one case once more that it doesn't get the seriousness of sexual assault, punishing New York Behemothic punter Josh Brown only when information technology embarrassingly came to light that his team and the league had known of his married woman beating ways. Most NFL teams, despite the league'due south $xiii billion in annual revenues, however pay their cheerleaders below minimum wage. And a New York Times investigation documented the lengths to which the league lied for years about its epidemic of concussions, every bit did the 2022 Frontline documentary League of Denial: The NFL'due south Concussion Crisis.

Long ago, our sports pages started reading like the police force blotter, more rap canvas than boxscore. Just, more recently, something else happened: Cheering for a professional sports squad started to feel like rooting for big tobacco. The moniker "socially conscious sports fan" has go an oxymoron. You lookout our games nowadays and feel complicit in exploitation born of crass commercialism. And the corruption of our sports has trickled down; college basketball and football are every bit corroded every bit the pro leagues. Every time a ascendant NCAA basketball game team graduates all of viii pct of its players, as the University of Connecticut did during a title run a few years ago, every time boosters masquerading as local authorities allow varsity athletes accused of rape escape justice … you inquire yourself: Just what am I cheering for, anyway?

I'm a long suffering fan of the Philadelphia 76ers. They've inflicted enough pain on the court of late, but, hey, I'm from Philly … suffering through the basketball stylings of Robert Covington is what we exercise. But significant insult was added to that injury when the team, with nary a notation of protest from area media, took some 250 local jobs out of the Philadelphia economy and moved their headquarters to Camden. That's something similar a $two million annual hit on the city. When, earlier this season, the squad refused to let a young African-American vocaliser perform the national anthem because she was wearing a "We Matter" t-shirt, I felt like I could no longer compartmentalize my fandom away from my progressive values. I needed a new hoops squad.

Thankfully, there's one right in our own backyard. For the concluding few years, I've been attending the basketball game games at the Westtown School, a high academic Quaker day and boarding schoolhouse near Due west Chester. There, I see great hoops performed by tomorrow'south collegiate and NBA stars, simply I don't feel like I take to check my worldview at the gym's door. That'due south why I'chiliad helping to produce a documentary on Westtown and the meaning of its nationally-ranked basketball game program. Considering they prove that the ancient Greeks, with their emphasis on the goal of kalokagathia—bodily and moral and intellectual excellence—were onto something: That athletics are an intrinsic role of academics and a way to observe things about oneself.

Berger has told his kids that if any player asks how many points he scored, that kid is going to run suicide sprints at the side by side practice. The goal of coaching, as Berger sees it, has zip to exercise with drawing upward plays on a chalkboard. Information technology's counteracting all the me-first messages kids arrive our culture.

The coach at Westtown is 49-yr-old Seth Berger, who penned a widely read open letter to Donald Trump for The Citizen in Nov. Berger, fresh out of Wharton in the '90s, founded the groundbreaking basketball apparel company And1 and sold information technology for millions by his mid-thirties. His partners all went on to beginning other innovative businesses, but Berger realized that what made And1 a success was not his business acumen then much as his innate agreement of his consumer: Hoop-obsessed teenagers, non coincidentally an apt description of Berger's formative years. He decided he wanted to assist plow boys into immature men by instilling values and developing character. So he bought a bunch of coaching DVDs and, for all of $4,500 a year which he donates back to the school, he became the coach at a sleepy, loftier academic Quaker boarding school with no basketball program to speak of.

Fast forrard 10 years and Berger has used the same squad-building skills that congenital his company to plow Westtown into a national basketball powerhouse, currently among the summit-ranked in the nation. On his squad, there's half dozen'11" center Mo Bamba, projected to be one of the peak picks in the 2022 NBA draft; 6'8" point guard Cam Carmine, projected to be one of the tiptop picks in the 2022 NBA draft, and at to the lowest degree two other tin't miss college stars with pro possibilities.

More important for a recovering progressive sports fan, though, is the type of men these kids are becoming. Bamba may very well spend his 1-and-done collegiate twelvemonth at the likes of Kentucky or Duke, just he'south also actively because condign the commencement ever Harvard one-and-done; he speaks of the opportunity he has to redefine what it means to be a scholar-athlete, and about how, when he does brand it big, he has aggressive plans to build a state-of-the-art rec center with academic services for immature boys and girls in his hometown of Harlem, New York. And Reddish spends half dozen to 9 a.1000. in the gym even on game days—while maintaining high grades. All Westtown players, similar every other student, hold on campus "work study" jobs, so there's Mo Bamba slopping cafeteria food at lunchtime, next to a 5'two" sophomore daughter. They all work the country on the campus' subcontract. And if one has a newspaper due tomorrow, it'due south a no-brainer for Jitney Berger: No practice today. Do your paper.

Honestly, the games are corking—I swear, the Westtown starting five (6'11", 6'9", half-dozen'8", 6'viii" and six'vii") would requite some higher teams a competitive scrimmage—but what's truly inspiring is that Berger is showing that high academics and dandy athletics demand not be mutually sectional. This isn't the crappy, earthbound, lily-white three-man weave ball of the Ivy or Patriot leagues—information technology's high-flying, slam-dunking hoops performed by smart, joyous kids.

The pressure on them can be enormous. What are the odds that these prodigies emerge unscathed from the degree to which youth sports has been professionalized? Berger's players have to size up AAU coaches, higher recruiters, and media types—all wanting things from them—and that doesn't even bear upon the pressure level coming from parents who unwittingly teach their children how to be selfish.

"When a kid comes habitation from a game, you hope the parent asks, 'How'd the team practise?'" Berger in one case told me. "But every parent always asks, 'How many points did you lot score?' It is never how many rebounds did you get, how many loose assurance did you get, did y'all defend, did you lot communicate, were you yelling encouragement from the bench. Information technology is literally the same question from every parent across the world: 'How many points did you score, how many goals, did you lot hitting a homerun?' Right?"

That's why there's no stat sheet at Westtown. Berger has told his kids that if any player asks how many points he scored, that child is going to run suicide sprints at the adjacent exercise. The goal of coaching, as Berger sees it, has nothing to do with drawing up plays on a chalkboard. Information technology's counteracting all the me-get-go messages kids get in our culture. That'due south why the back of Westtown'south warmup jersey reads "I Am For Y'all"—a message from each player to one some other—and why Berger oft reminds his charges that, if yous take out an "S" and one "T" from their school proper name, they'd self place as "We Town." To Berger, coaching—whether in a corporate setting or a gym—is all about establishing a culture that elevates "we" over "me."

Don't get me incorrect; these are kids, not saints. In that location are nonetheless the usual rites of adolescent passage. But at least Berger and Westtown seem to deal with issues head on, and to find teachable moments in them. What I've witnessed at Westtown stands in stark dissimilarity to the sports culture at large.

Take, for case, the fascinating Showtime documentary about our Sixers' tiptop typhoon option, Ben Simmons, One and Done. In chronicling how Simmons went to Louisiana Country Academy for a yr, as per NBA rules that say players must be 19 and a year removed from high school before they tin can bring together the league—essentially making him a professional apprentice at no recompense—it is, rightfully, an indictment of collegiate exploitation. (No ane prohibits a collegiate violin role player from earning what the marketplace can deport, after all.)

In the film, Simmons knows that he needs to achieve at least a 1.vii grade point average in his get-go semester in order to be eligible to play in his second. In one case the 2nd semester rolls around, he stops going to course, because he knows that NBA riches expect.

More important for a recovering progressive sports fan is the blazon of men these kids are condign. Bamba may very well spend his one-and-done collegiate yr at the likes of Kentucky or Duke, just he's as well actively considering becoming the first ever Harvard one-and-done; he speaks of the opportunity he has to redefine what it means to be a scholar-athlete.

"I'm hither to play, I'm not here to get to school," he says. "I can't go a degree in two semesters. It's kind of pointless. I experience like I'm wasting time."

Yes, the NCAA is a "joke," as Simmons says, but his reaction to it is merely equally contemptuous every bit LSU'southward using of him. After all, other high school one and done prospects with no interest in collegiate academics take opted to spend a year in Europe, getting paid to play ball. Instead, what we get from Simmons during his year at LSU is a troubling strain of anti-intellectualism, a refusal to consider that reading some books might ultimately be its own reward. There'southward a touching moment in the motion picture when Simmons' mother, packing up his auto and sending him on his way to LSU, tearfully tells him, "Be a expert person." Unbeknownst to Simmons, going to form—existent classes—or only exploring on his own some of the transformative ideas resting on the bookshelves of the campus library might take been a way to laurels his mother's request.

I know this considering I shudder to think how I'd take behaved these last decades without the benefit of what I learned at a similar age. I nonetheless recollect of Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative, which I sopped up in a sophomore philosophy elective, whenever I notice myself in some messy moral space: "Never treat a person equally a means to an end. Persons are always ends in themselves." That's a potentially life-irresolute way to be in the globe that, information technology strikes me now, is not so dissimilar from Berger'south message to his Westtown players today.

Those players are about to enter a world they are wholly unprepared for, which is why Berger's wisdom is so needed. The problem isn't our games; it's what the intersection of our games with big business has wrought. Contrary to popular conventionalities, our pop culture sports jones has long been a laboratory for progressivism and egalitarianism. Remember, the Civil Rights movement didn't actually being with Dark-brown five. Board of Educational activity; information technology actually started seven years earlier, when Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line. Opposition to the Vietnam War didn't start with Eugene McCarthy'due south and Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaigns; information technology was actually Muhammad Ali's "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong" public statements that began to turn the tide against a wrongheaded military action. In recent years, the historically homophobic sports industry has even embraced the coming out of NBA player Jason Collins and linebacker Michael Sam, and celebrated Caitlyn Jenner.

But, increasingly, information technology's go harder to find such object lessons in our daily sports narrative. That'due south why, many nights this winter, while the luxury suites bustle at Sixers games—complete with preferred parking and private entrances—you can observe me in Westtown's shoebox of a gym, watching great players play a game they dearest, discovering together the thrill of common purpose and shared run a risk. This is what beingness a sports fan means, circa 2017: seeking out those sporting outlets that adhere to our values. It's an added bonus if, equally at Westtown, the quality of the hoops kicks the donkey of your high-priced pro option, likewise.

Photos courtesy of Ed Cunicelli for Westtown School

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/westtown-school-boys-basketball/

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