26 new york | february 17–march 1, 2020
TIME, not long ago,
have been unusual
father of a 2-year-
photo of himself
tshirt with the logo
yon, a private high
nfashionable outer
an Fernando Valley.
a time when one of
ost famouspeople
at he was tying his
p school would have
moment inthe lives
ger there. Not so at
SierraCanyon, which has recently
becomethemostInstagrammedhighschool in America.
“Honestly,I forgotthat evenhappened,” said B. J. Boston,a senior
whoplaysonthevarsitybasketballteam, the Trailblazers—the rea-
sonforDrake’sinterest.Bostonis considered one of the country’s
besthigh-schoolbasketballplayersandhad transferred from Geor-
giatospendhissenioryearinL. A.,but he was not the primary
reasonforthehype.LastMay,LeBronJames and Dwyane Wade,
whohadformedtheNBA’s firstsuper-team in Miami a decade ago,
announcedtheywere sendingtheirsons, Bronny and Zaire, to
SierraCanyontoplay basketballtogether. Since then, more and
morecelebritieswere showingupcourtside at the team’s games,
evenonnightswhenthey couldhavecaught the Clippers or Lakers
atStaplesCenter. TheTrailblazerssold out arenas from Dallas to
China(wherethey tooka two-weekAugust trip throughJiaxing,
Jinhua,Lishui,Suichang,Shangyu,and Hong Kong, just before the
NBA’sownpreseasonbrand-buildingtour was sucked intodebates
overtheproteststhere).In earlyJanuary, when SierraCanyon
playedMinnehahaAcademy at Minneapolis’s Target Center, home
of the NBA’s Timberwolves, they drew 17,000 fans—more than had
watched the Timberwolves play the Golden State Warriors two
nights before. Sierra Canyon has as many assistant coaches as the
Lakers (six), has flown as far as an average NBA team (more than
40,000 miles), and will appear on ESPN 15 times this season.
All of which meant a tag from Drake prompted little more
from the team’s players than a debate over his place inthe rap
pantheon. “He’s my favorite rapper,” said Terren Frank,a senior
whose father, Tellis, had also played in the NBA.
“Stop it, Terren,” Zaire Wade said.
“Drake is definitely not a rapper,” said Ziaire Williams, ranked
No. 7 on ESPN’s list of the country’s best seniors, one spot below
B. J. Boston.
“I like Drake. I just can’t listen to him all day,” Boston said.
“Who said all day?,” Wade said.
“Okay, I can’t listen to him, period,” Boston said. Wade, a
Drake defender, thought that was going too far. He suggested
they all needed to go back and listen to Drake’s early stuff, from
2010, when they were 8 years old.
It was lunchtime at Sierra Canyon, and the four seniors were
having Double-Doubles from In-N-Out. Across the 40-acre cam-
pus, 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. It could’ve been Har-
vard-Westlake or Crossroads, where the children of celebrities
mingle seamlessly with the offspring of Hollywood executives and
others from the city’s elite—a finishing school for the entertain-
ment world’s next generation. Sierra Canyon’s board of trustees has
included the head of Nickelodeon, L.A. Reid’s wife, and Will and
Jada Pinkett Smith. And even without the NBA kids, the Trailblaz-
ers’ roster includes the son of a record executive who helped launch
the Wu-Tang Clan; the son of a former professional basketball
player in China; and the son of Pookey Wigington, a comedian
with a weekly show at the Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard.
(Wigington’s sons go by Snookey, Wookey, Zookey, and Tookey; the
last is a backup guard for the Trailblazers.) Hall of Fame running
back Jim Brown’s daughter Morgan scored the game-winning goal
in the girls’ soccer team’s first playoff game last week
But the addition of Dwyane Wade and, especially, LeBron James
to the school’s PTA heralded a new level of fame. Over the past
decade, the NBA has turned Los Angeles into its home away from
the court, with basketball becoming another arm in the city’s vast
entertainment-industrial complex—music, film, television, hoops.
Seemingly half of the league’s players retreat there in the off-season
to play pickup and strategize post- basketball careers, as LeBron did
long before joining the Lakers two years ago. Or they retire in L.A.,
somewhere along the 101, as Wade and his family did last year. (He
is married to the actress Gabrielle Union.) It’s not just thatLeBron
appeared in Trainwreck and is rebooting Space Jam. He has his
own digital-media studio and his own Hollywood production com-
pany, as does Wade, and both dads have camera crewsmaking
documentaries about their basketball-playing sons.
And just as these fathers had maneuvered to direct the course of
the NBA by negotiating their own trades and group free-agent sign-
ings, the high schoolers had become a youth super-team. The
crowds weren’t coming to Sierra Canyon to catch a glimpse of
LeBron, or at least not only that. They were there to watch adynasty
introduce its next generation. “Don’t disrespect Bronny!,”a young
fan screamed during one game after someone in the crowd threw
a Starburst that hit Bronny in the back. During a stop on Sierra
Canyon’s tour of China, Zaire Wade walked over to sign a poster of
himself that a teenage girl had made. When he gave her a hug, she
started weeping. Bronny is only a freshman and comes off the
bench for Sierra Canyon, but he already has 4.6 million Instagram
followers, which would make him one of the 20 most followed play-
ers in the NBA. Before his freshman season even started, and
shortly after his 15th birthday, a sneaker-company executive
declared him “the most influential high-school athlete of all time.”
The kids, meanwhile, are trying to navigate lives as semi-
normal teenagers. “I can’t do Shakespeare,” Williams said over
the Double-Doubles. “I’m looking at it like, What is this?”
“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.
“When he’s talking to himself ?,” Williams said.
“No, he’s talking to Polonius, Ophelia’s dad,” Wade said. “Y’all
need to catch up.”
“Who’s Ophelia?,” Frank said.
“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.’ ”
All four of the seniors around the table had transferred from
elsewhere, which made the environment at Sierra Canyon,
where several of them were taking a yoga class, something they
were still adjusting to. “It’s like High School Musical,” Wade said.
“Kids act like they like each other, but they really don’t,” Boston
said, turning to Wade. “Tell ’em what you told me this morning.”
“It’s like, out here,” said Wade, who had recently moved from
Miami, “everybody has a certain expectation of what you got to be.
If you ain’t up here where I expect you to be, you ain’t nobody.”
“L.A. is lit,” Frank, a native, said defensively.