Last week, my wife and I had the opportunity to travel for a few days to Atlantic City to watch our youngest (yet largest) son, Eyal, play basketball at an event that I am sure few in our readership have ever heard about. In truth, I had never heard about it either a month or two ago. It was an event called The 2024 Atlantic City Jam Fest and it’s one of the largest basketball tournaments in the country for high school basketball players. Nearly 550 teams from around the country participate, with literally thousands of players and hundreds of coaches all crowding into an immense convention center hall with nearly 40 courts and simultaneous games occurring for 10 hours straight for three days.

So why did Eyal participate and why was I there? Here’s the answer: About two months ago, our son received word that he had been invited to play on a team of yeshiva high school ball players from around the country. A donor who prefers to remain anonymous (it’s not me) and who loves Yeshiva League basketball thought that it would be a good idea to put together some of the best yeshiva high school varsity players and enter them into one of the few summer tournaments in the country that doesn’t take place on Shabbos. The team was named the JDS Elite (JDS standing for Jewish Day School) and the donor also hired a coach new to the Yeshiva League world by the name of Brendan Barile, of Riverdale Country School. An all-Jewish team had never been put together and entered into the Atlantic City tournament before. This year would be the first.

Although my son is an avid basketball player (and also an advertiser in our paper as a basketball trainer) and played in the Pan American Maccabi Games in Buenos Aires last year as well as smaller tournaments closer to home in New Jersey, we have never been to a tournament of this size and breadth.

Tryouts and practices took place in late June and the team was all ready to meet in Atlantic City. In truth, it wasn’t simple for Eyal to attend as he is currently working as a counselor at Camp Mesorah but he was able to arrange to take off three days and drive down from camp with his friend and TABC teammate, Ayden Gurin.

As a quick aside, I don’t write about sports much in this space but my family and good friends know that I am a big Yeshiva League basketball fan. I was never much of a ball player myself and the closest I ever got to playing in the Yeshiva League was making the second round of tryouts at MTA and then getting cut for three years running. And I like to joke today that my back begins to hurt just from looking at a basketball court after innumerable and painful pulled backs on the court in my 20s and early 30s. My playing days are long over…pickleball here I come!

However, as a parent of two basketball-playing sons, perhaps my greatest personal entertainment and diversion from the stresses of running The Jewish Link is watching them play basketball at a high level. While I am fiercely proud of all their incredible growth and accomplishments on the personal side, their Torah/yiddishkeit side, and on the court, there is little more fulfilling, immersive and emotional for me than cheering my boys on at a game and living through their highs and lows as a parent/spectator. Thankfully, it’s also still socially acceptable to yell a bit from the sidelines, which is also a good stress reliever. I try to always yell positive things and I succeed most of the time, I think.

So back to Atlantic City and the tournament. How did they do? Bottom line is that the team made all of us parents proud to be there. Although they didn’t win their bracket championship, they won their first two games against very tough teams from Virginia Beach and Philadelphia, before falling in the quarterfinal game to a super solid team from DC with an unrelenting physical defense and a 6’9” center who was just a bit too much for our boys to handle. They all played hard and well and never gave up and never let the game get away from them.

On the team were two young men from the 2024 championship-winning Magen David Yeshiva (MDY), Josh Shabbott and Mark Sardar, and also Sam Weiss from local rival SAR High School. I was happy that my father, who joined us there, could also help cheer on the boys and he is a much bigger basketball fan than I am. He was happy to have the chance to finally root for the boys from MDY and SAR and not against them.

All in all, it was a real chavayah to be there with many future college and pro ball players in attendance, along with many college coaches. Wherever we went in the convention hall, Jewish players on other teams came over to us and let us know they were Jewish as well. We met Jewish kids from Maryland, Montreal and Florida. They all thought it was quite cool that our team was playing as a Jewish team.

On another note, it was incredibly impressive seeing how committed so many parents and players from the other teams were. Many of the tournament’s players are seriously pursuing basketball scholarships and their dedication and commitment really showed. It was even a bit humbling and a lesson to me—and I think to the boys on the team—to see teen boys as young as 13 or 14 taking their basketball so seriously. It was as if they already had full time jobs and professions and this is not something one always expects from high school boys.

All of our team’s parents attending pitched in to make sure that the team was well fed with food supplied from the two local kosher restaurants there and a nice camaraderie developed among all of us who were there watching our boys play over the three days. We also had a chance to see the local Orthodox community as we davened every morning at Atlantic City’s only Orthodox shul, Rodef Shalom, and we were greeted quite warmly by the rabbi and shul members.

I am not sure if our son will be playing in this tournament next year, but it was a kind of once in a lifetime experience for him and his teammates, and for my wife and I. We will not soon forget it.

Congratulations to the JDS Elite on their plays and to Coach Barile for coaching the boys and contributing so much to their and our experience in AC!

NOTE: If you want to see more about this team, feel free to check them out at @jdselitebasketball on Instagram.