The children of LeBron James and Dwyane Wade play on the same L.A. prep-school basketball team — along with the seven-foot-tall son of a Chinese pro and two other future first-round picks. reeveswiedeman reports on a very strange kind of teenage fame
From left, Amari Bailey, sophomore guard; Tookey Wigington, sophomore guard; Shy Odom, sophomore power forward; and Bronny James, freshman guard, at a home game in January. Photo: Michelle Groskopf This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Zaire Wade, senior guard. Photo: Michelle Groskopf It was lunchtime at Sierra Canyon, and the four seniors were having Double-Doubles from In-N-Out. Across the 40-acre campus, the scene looked much as it would at any elite high school in L.A.: a student using his backpack as a pillow on a picnic table, a girl walking down the hall in tears with a remorseful-looking boy at her side, somebody fixing a skateboard.
“Nah, bro, you gotta watch videos on it,” Wade said. He had been consulting a cartoon retelling on YouTube and pulled up a clip describing Hamlet waiting for the ghost of his father to appear. “Are you at the part where Hamlet’s going crazy?,” he asked.“No, he’s talking to Polonius, Ophelia’s dad,” Wade said. “Y’all need to catch up.”“Ophelia’s the girl that Hamlet likes, remember?,” Wade said. “So when Polonius found out Hamlet liked her, he was like, ‘Oh, you can’t go with him.
After LeBron signed with the Lakers in 2018, Bronny spent his eighth-grade year at Crossroads, a few miles from the family’s home in Brentwood. “When he went to Crossroads, I knew it wasn’t going to work,” Rock Pillsbury, who moved from Texas to become Sierra Canyon’s athletic director, told me.
Fulfilling the trustees’s second request was a challenge. Six boys showed up to the school’s first football practice, while the starting center on its inaugural basketball team was five-foot-nine. In 2010, the school still had no gym, and Jeff Feinberg, a rich Jewish guy who lived in Hidden Hills, approached Skrumbis with a proposition.
From left, Ryan Rifkind, senior forward; Harold Yu; Shy Odom; and Dylan Metoyer. Photo: Michelle Groskopf Back center, Zaire Wade; front right, Ryan Rifkind. Photo: Michelle Groskopf “This is our safe spot,” Ziaire Williams said one afternoon, entering the basketball team’s private locker room in the Feinberg Family Pavilion. “It’s a little man cave,” Zaire Wade said.
During one Sierra Canyon game, I sat courtside with Richard Shapiro, the school’s chief financial officer. “My wife says I seem to have more fun doing this stuff than all my other jobs combined!,” he said.
From left, LeBron James with son Bryce; and Amari Bailey. Photo: Michelle Groskopf. From left, LeBron James with son Bryce; and Amari Bailey. Photo: Michelle Groskopf. LeBron has said his “greatest achievement” would be to play in the NBA with his son. When Ken Griffey Jr. briefly played alongside his dad as a 20-year-old center fielder for the Seattle Mariners in 1990, it felt like a novelty ripped from father-son fantasy camp.
One irony of Sierra Canyon’s season of excessive hype is that its best players, Boston and Williams, are not sports royalty. Another irony is that, despite all the attention, the team has occasionally struggled, losing to less heralded teams from Virginia, Minnesota, Long Island, and the other side of L.A.; Sierra Canyon is currently ranked 17th in ESPN’s list of the country’s 25 best high-school basketball teams, one spot ahead of a public high school in Camden, New Jersey.
In retirement, Kobe had begun to navigate the NBA-Hollywood nexus better than anyone, winning an Oscar in 2018, and all of L.A. and much of the country joined the NBA in mourning. The documentary crew from LeBron’s company was called into action on their off day to film the scene at the school, and while Bronny James and Zaire Wade had grown up with the Bryants as family friends, the other Sierra Canyon players also seemed moved by his death.
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