In late September, Melvin Robinson, a 6-foot-5 former professional basketball player, stood inside a small gymnasium in New York City, arms folded, surveying a few dozen 14- and 15-year-old boys running up and down a hardwood court. It was the first day of junior-varsity basketball tryouts at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, the prestigious Jewish school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and Robinson was its new head coach.
Last season, Heschel’s JV team won just three games in the Metropolitan Yeshiva High School Athletic League—commonly referred to as the Yeshiva League—and Robinson could see why. The players were in terrible physical condition, and they displayed poor fundamentals and lazy work habits. They preferred going one-on-one to sharing the ball—with a penchant for dribbling into traffic and chucking up ill-advised shots—and jogged rather than sprinted back on defense. Guys were dribbling right with their left hand, going left with their right hand, missing layups uncontested. One boy simply picked the ball up and ran with it, in flagrant defiance of the basketball’s most basic rule.
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From Tablet Magazine
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