This past Monday, my wife and I attended our final varsity basketball game as parents of our youngest but tallest son, Eyal. This was no ordinary game. It was the championship game of the YU-sponsored 2025 Red Sarachek National Tournament with 20 teams from around North America competing for the bragging rights to be called the best yeshiva high school basketball team on the continent. Playing one game a day over four days, every team endured a pretty grueling schedule culminating in the final championship game on Monday afternoon.
I was so proud to be there. My son’s TABC team had been one of the strongest teams in the yeshiva league throughout the season but had lost two weeks ago in overtime in the yeshiva league regular season championship to rival DRS. It was a tough loss for us, his parents, and we probably took it even harder than Eyal did.
However, with the Sarachek tournament, our son and his team had one more chance to prove to themselves and to yeshiva basketball fans that they were a force to be reckoned with. And prove themselves they did. Over four demanding games, TABC beat all comers and won TABC’s first-ever Sarachek tournament in a tough game against longtime rival Magen David.
It was a truly special moment for our son, his teammates and his school, and you can read more about their victory on pages 213-214 in this week’s paper.
My son doesn’t really want me to talk too much about him in this space, so I won’t, but he knows how proud we are of him and how well he played. My wife and I are still getting texts and messages from friends and family far and wide who heard about the game or watched it live. As one of his teammates’ mothers commented, “Winning Sarachek almost feels a bit like making a wedding with so many people wishing us and our son mazal tov on the win.” She is absolutely right. It’s such a warm, touching feeling that you kind of want to hold onto and never let go. I have been non-stop smiling since Monday afternoon and it’s now Wednesday afternoon.
However, this column is not about my son and his deserving team, rather, it’s about me as a committed and slightly crazed basketball parent who is now at the end of what could be considered a career which began when our second son Noam, started playing in local basketball leagues in the third and fourth grade almost 20 years ago. And it’s also a little bit about my basketball-loving wife who started crying on Monday night when she realized that it would be the last time washing her son’s jersey (although I really don’t feel the same way on this one, but perhaps I just don’t share her love of laundry).
I will admit now, years later, that even from an early age, I steered my boys away from sports like soccer, baseball and tennis, and made it abundantly clear to them that basketball was the “primary” sport for our family and household. Thankfully, they not only went along with this not-so-subtle manipulation, but thrived and took to it.
Where did this love and passion for basketball come from? I was never a great ball player and I joke that my main claim to basketball fame was that I was the last guy cut from the MTA team tryouts at the beginning of each school year—for three years in a row. Pretty sad, I know.
However, I liked playing with friends and in camp and played recreationally in our town through my late 20s. Ultimately, however, constant back pulls and pain ultimately sidelined me for good. Today, even looking at a basketball court will sometimes cause my back to spasm.
But for all who know my family, the love for basketball really comes from my father, Aaron Kinderlehrer. It’s his influence on me that got me into basketball. My dad loved and still loves basketball, loves rooting for his beloved YU Macs, and was probably one of the only Orthodox Jewish season ticketholders at St. John’s from the mid-1980s thru the mid-1990s. He took me to so many games over the years and tried hard to impart his love for the game to me…and it worked. It definitely rubbed off.
What is it about basketball? I have long wanted to write about why basketball is a truly Jewish sport, and I have read many pieces and heard shiurim from luminaries such as Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik and others to explain why other sports such as baseball are the model “Jewish” sports (which I never really understood as I have always found baseball to be just a bit too slow and sometimes boring – which basketball rarely is). But I still haven’t found the perfect shiur on basketball. For me, basketball is all about the lessons it teaches those who play it correctly. It teaches you the need to trust those around you. To share the ball and be selfless. That even the best players cannot win alone. The need to have a game plan and work really hard. The need to sometimes take measured risks that may or may not pay off. To play until the final whistle. And perhaps the most important lesson is the need to sometimes adapt and make the most of what you have, and find a way forward even when things are messy and aren’t going your way. All of these lessons are echoed in the history of the Jewish people and in the Torah values we try to live by.
As my younger boys grew up, I constantly searched for opportunities for the boys to get better, such as end-of-summer camps that I didn’t really have the extra money for, and I pushed them to do a bit more than perhaps some of their other athletic friends. And they both excelled on and off the court, although I always felt they could do more to improve and grow. And after years of them playing on their school teams, local AAU teams, etc., both my sons grew into strong players. Basically, I couldn’t play with either of them by the time they got to seventh grade as they were already better than me and too good. Very humbling as a father.
For my wife and I, watching our sons play basketball at a relatively high level in and out of the yeshiva league was the literal highlight of our days and nights. For our son Noam who is now learning in Shor Yoshuv, he and his TABC teammates, including current YU Macs star Zevi Samet, had a more-than-legitimate chance to win two varsity championships and would likely have done very well in the Sarachek tournaments before COVID cancelled it all. Noam made the effort to come to every tournament game this past week (and in truth, he came to every game he could this whole year), to always root for and give chizuk to his younger brother and I certainly believe he was thinking a bit wistfully about what might have been for him if COVID hadn’t happened.
But as a parent, watching my son and his team play ball and succeed at Sarachek was always about more than great entertainment and far more than the sport teaching critical life lessons. As any serious basketball parent will admit, when watching my son play, I feel as if a part of me is on the court, that I am actually “playing” the game. I may not be able to shoot or play defense like my sons, but it’s “me” that is out there on the court in some literal sense. It’s ‘me’ that is upset when a play goes wrong or an easy shot doesn’t fall, because it’s “my play” and “my shot” also. Us parents aren’t just observers but we are part and parcel of the “team.” I believe that all parents feel this way on some level or another in watching their children on and off the court. Just with basketball, it’s far more intense, more high energy, more focused.
My wife and I will just miss feeling this way, we will miss this intensity, this sense of excitement, passion, purpose and drive to win all fused together within a 32-minute game. I have been crying a bit as I struggled to write this piece as I already am missing it. Basketball has been such a big part of our family’s life for so long … we will miss it dearly. The void will be hard to fill. Pickleball anyone?
(Note: I just want to wish a personal mazal tov to the championship TABC team and the coaches, Coach Oz Cross and Robert Hoenig, TABC’s Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Josh Kahn and Head of School Rabbi Shlomo Stochel, and Athletic Director Oren Glickman, who have all been such a major part of our lives over the past few years. Yashar Koach on the win!)
