Posted By James Besser
Hoops for the Heschel Heat / Eli Grossman in Teaneck, NJ
I play varsity basketball for the Heschel Heat (we are currently undefeated). Our team is a member of the Metropolitan Yeshiva High School Basketball League (MYSHBL, for short). MYSHBL has twenty two teams, twenty one of which are Yeshivot. My school, the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, is the lone non-yeshiva team in the league.
This league is more than basketball, in fact-for some-it is the most important thing in their school life. I love my team. I love my coaches. As a senior, I am truly enjoying my final year (potentially) of organized basketball.
At the beginning of the year, my coach, the illustrious Adam Melzer, organized a pre-season basketball tournament in memory of Freddy Hirsch, a Jew murdered by the Nazis. This tournament brought together eight different teams for various games during the week, a Shabbat in Teaneck, and a pair of weekend games.
In my three years in the Yeshiva league, my opponents have always been faceless-in the interest of alliteration-frummies. I have known nothing about them as people, anything about how they are off the court.
The Shabbat in Teaneck showed me that even though Heschel is alone in being a non-Yeshiva, the kids across the Yeshiva league are eerily homogenous. We all love basketball and we all love Judaism, even if we express it in different ways: HANC could be seen singing z'mirot loudly during lunch, Heschel thought deeply and challenged the standards in Shabbat-afternoon discussion groups, and a Frisch player layned from the Torah. The tournament was a huge success, even though Heschel came in second place, losing a close one to HANC.
This league is populated by Jewish basketball players. Now I don't want to belittle the talents of the likes of Max Feldstein, Gavriel Feld, Eddie Gindi, or Steven Ritholtz-the premier players of our league, but I'll always have this thought in the back of my mind telling me that this is a second tier league. But, in fact, it doesn't matter. MYHSBL is not meant to be a top league with Division I recruits. It's supposed to be a unifying force-a force that unites Jewish teens with a common love for the sport.