The posters, like NBA star James Harden’s beard, are hard to miss. If you scroll through the photos in skills trainer Drew Hanlen’s Instagram feed, you’ll notice large blocks of Hebrew text on the walls surrounding the court he uses for many of his offseason sessions.
Those posters, as reporter Louis Keene noted in a recent article for The Forward, “give the location away.” Hanlen and his clients, including Harden, Joel Embiid and Jayson Tatum, are practicing in a Jewish high school.
“That’s Shalhevet, an Orthodox school in Los Angeles whose basketball gym is also the site of weekly school assemblies. (Hence the posters),” Keene wrote.
Other household names from the NBA, like LeBron James and Russell Westbrook, have been pictured practicing in a different Jewish high school a few miles away.
“What’s the draw of hardwood courts with Jewish wisdom on the walls?” In addition to being relatively new, they’re well-maintained, available, and — crucially, for some of the most famous people on the planet — private,” Keene noted.
The article highlighted the Orthodox Jewish community’s passion for basketball, which fuels investment in state-of-the-art gyms at associated high schools.
“Their top-quality courts now mean a possible brush with fame for high school kids who regard these players as larger than life,” Keene wrote.
Last year, several players agreed to go to a school orientation session at Shalhevet and meet with students, including some who would love to play basketball at a higher level one day.
“If I really want to be great one day at what I do, I have to work hard,” one student told The Forward. “And just watching them work out and seeing what they do, it’s just rep after rep after rep of the same thing, over and over again.”