Bronny James’ ex-teachers, teammates in Ohio recall a kid who ‘wasn’t above anyone else’

BATH TOWNSHIP, Ohio — Carrie Brown was an exasperated middle-school teacher who had a famous student she knew she could count on.

In the fall of 2017, Brown was teaching social studies at Old Trail School, a small, private institution of about 500 children from ages 2 through the eighth grade on a sprawling 62 acres inside Cuyahoga Valley National Park, a few miles northeast of Akron, Ohio.

Each day at recess, as Brown looked out onto the outdoor basketball court at the bottom of an old amphitheater, she watched her sixth-grade students bicker intensely over who should have the ball or take all the shots.

She knew Bronny James was the opposite of that when he was her student the year before, so she asked the seventh grader for help.

“I pulled him aside and said, ‘Hey, would you mind giving up a recess and talking to my sixth graders?’ But I didn’t tell him what to say,” Brown said during a recent tour of the school and visit with several of Bronny’s former teachers and coaches, in which Brown allowed The Athletic into her classroom where she once taught Bronny.

The hallways inside the Old Trail campus building where most classes are taught are long and narrow. The walls are white and the lockers red; there are hooks on both sides for younger students to hang their coats and backpacks.

Brown said she wasn’t surprised when Bronny, 13 at the time, agreed to forgo his recess, stroll down the long hallway past the lockers and the hooks and into Room 616 where she taught him world history to deliver his message.

But she was stunned by the poignancy and clarity of what he said.

“It was like I paid him,” she said. “He said perfectly that, ‘If you ever want to play competitively, like for real, they’re not going to take you unless you’re a team player. You could be the best of the best. But if you don’t know how to work with other people, then they don’t want you on their team.’

“Coming from him, it meant so much, because he could speak to it.”

If all you know about Bronny James, 20, the eldest son of the world-renowned basketball megastar and billionaire LeBron James, is that Bronny is young, rich and famous, that he plays on the Los Angeles Lakers because his dad, who is the all-time leading scorer in NBA history and also a Laker, wanted it to be so, then the way the people of Old Trail remember him might surprise you.

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Old Trail School is just minutes from Bronny’s family mansion in Bath Township and about 25 miles from Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, where LeBron, Bronny and the Lakers will play the Cleveland Cavaliers on Wednesday night.

LeBron, or Dad, whichever you prefer here, built the house and moved into it early in his career with the Cavs. For a time, Savannah James, LeBron’s wife and Bronny’s mother, sat on the board at Old Trail.

Bronny went there for pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and part of first grade before moving to Miami when his dad joined the Heat for the 2010-11 NBA season. When the family returned to Cleveland in 2014, Bronny, his younger brother Bryce and their baby sister Zhuri were all enrolled there. Bronny was back at Old Trail from fourth through seventh grade, before the family relocated to Los Angeles.

Bronny, his former teachers said, would occasionally miss a homework assignment. They learned to chalk that up to the time demands of a hectic life he led as the son of arguably the greatest NBA player ever, whose legend is even larger in the Cleveland and Akron areas.

To this day, though, Brown keeps in her desk a sample of Bronny’s creative writing and a picture he drew as part of a lesson on Greek mythology. “Bronny, this is excellent! I’m proud of you!” Brown wrote on his paper – a piece of historical fiction imagining how the children of Zeus plotted against one another to create the Olympics.

The accompanying art Bronny turned in as part of the assignment is neatly drawn and animated so that there are no crayon marks outside the contours of what he drew: a Black Trojan warrior with a red cape and galea on top of his battle helmet.

It’s almost eerie; six years after Bronny drew the picture he wound up playing basketball for the USC Trojans in his lone college season. But that’s not why Brown keeps it and shows it to her class each year.

She shares it as an example of good work from a child who could have ignored school and the people he met because of the fame and fortune he was born into, but didn’t.

“He’s a great kid — I miss him a lot,” Brown said.

Sarah Johnston was, and still is, head of school at Old Trail (like a principal). She has countless memories of Bronny, including the time she pulled him and his classmates out of a study hall, as she did from time to time, for a sojourn down to the school gym with the rubbery green floor for basketball.

Johnston still has the video on her phone. Bronny, a sixth grader, gets a jogging start from half court and dribbles toward a springboard which catapulted him into the air. Johnston, on both knees for the stunt, shrieked as Bronny skied over her for a dunk.

But she also remembers a class trip to one of the dozens of small parks on campus (Old Trail is the only school in the U.S. in a national park) when Bronny and his classmates were situated in a circle for some bonding exercises.

“You stepped into the circle if that’s something you relate to, you step out if it’s not, and I remember the teacher was like, ‘Who doesn’t have a cell phone?’ And everyone was like ‘Bronny,’” Johnston said in her office at Old Trail, a big smile across her face.

“He was like the last one to get a cell phone,” she continued. “I think LeBron and Savannah made really clear decisions about their kids having a lot of access to a lot of things, and they didn’t need that. … But the kids always had nice shoes though.”

Here are more stories of Bronny from the people who knew him at Old Trail.

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They saw Bronny’s humility, grace and kindness while managing his celebrity.

Johnston: I ultimately think the lasting impression I had from this short period of time that I was with Bronny was that he was a natural leader. He was there not to show off his talents in ways that would make anyone else feel badly about themselves. He was there to pump people up and bring out the best in them. He wasn’t above anyone else.

Tim Weber, Bronny’s basketball and lacrosse coach at Old Trail: I remember being truly flabbergasted that a kid with the amount of attention he was getting was able to keep track of who had scored and who had not scored on our team and made sure that they got opportunities to do so. He did everything possible when he was in there to give everybody a shot and hopefully a bucket.

Johnston: I remember sitting in class one time with Bronny, and it was like a coding class. But there was this little kid next to him who was, I mean, very young and very tiny little guy or whatever, and they’re laughing and playing this coding thing together, doing their thing. I mean, he was certainly not someone who would elevate himself above anyone else.

Ronald Teunissen van Manen, Bronny’s former gym teacher, athletic director and soccer coach: When he was in sixth grade, we won the league championship in triple overtime thanks to Bronny. It was a Sunday morning, and it was an unbelievable game. But I remember that after the game was over, the opposing team came to Savannah and asked, ‘Can I get Bronny’s signature or can I get a picture?’ And I remember her saying, ‘You know what? You got to ask him.’ And they asked him, and that’s sort of from where I witnessed the first time that he had to deal with that end of things.

Brown: We were doing a cyberbullying curriculum, and we were talking about what social media (is) and things that you don’t share and information you don’t share. And he’s like, ‘Well, what if you have like four Instagram accounts that you didn’t start?’ And I was like ‘Oh, I have things I’ve never heard before.’ But that was his world, right?

Will Harding, Bronny’s teammate in basketball and soccer, who was one year ahead of him: Bronny showed maturity. He didn’t try and be the superstar. He knew how to share the ball. He knew he had other good teammates around him.

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They saw the James family engage the school.

Johnston: The first time I met them, we have this back-to-school get together at the beginning of the year, and everyone comes in and you can get your books and your room and everything. They all came in kind of as a family. LeBron wasn’t there, but Savannah was, and I think her sister was with her. And Bronny came in carrying Zhuri, and they were all together and like, I just always remember them being such a unit, you know what I mean? I remember one time Bryce got hurt, like a playground or something. I remember he split his head open, and I was with him in the nurse’s office and he had glasses, so I think he hit his head and the glasses broke the skin. And we went and got Bronny, and Bronny came and sat with him, held his hand. That tightness, I think (Savannah) really drove a lot of that too.

Harding: LeBron was a really cool, good dad. He showed up to the school events we had. I remember one time you had to dress up as a book character and give a report on a book you read, and it was kind of a big thing. LeBron was at the school walking around just like a normal dad. He’d come to games like a normal dad. If you didn’t know basketball or if you were an alien or something and somehow didn’t know who he was, you would just think he was any other dad because he would be at our games, he’d be cheering everyone on, yelling at Bronny, yelling at Bronny’s friends and all of our teammates if they made a good play or if they did something funny.

Brown: I never met LeBron. I only saw him. I was doing crosswalk duty with my little stop sign. And I see this man coming in like, ‘Oh, he’s very tall.’ I did talk to Savannah quite a bit, like about work and that kind of stuff.

Johnston: I loved Savannah’s dad. He was at everything.

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They saw Bronny play soccer, lacrosse and of course basketball. But also, the violin?

Harding: He was in the orchestra. I know that because I was in the orchestra. I think he played the violin. So it was just like another thing where he’s like, he’s just one of us.

Teunissen van Manen: I don’t think he had a huge amount of exposure to soccer prior to being on that team, but he just intuitively understood the game and he had the athleticism to back it up. He was a center forward; he was quite good. He was so fast, and especially in his first couple of steps, if somebody would send him the ball, at that point, he had already beaten his defender and all he had to do was touch it three more times and it would go in the goal. I don’t know what the number of goals were that season, but it was significant.

Weber: Bronny definitely took to lacrosse easily. And coaching lacrosse is very similar to coaching basketball, so I worked with him on a couple of fundamental moves. He was able to master them pretty much in a few practices, and that would get him in front of the goal. But, you know, his engine never stopped. He’d be getting ground balls off the field. He’d be chasing guys down from behind.

Harding: I know now the Lakers really like him for his defensive instincts. And I definitely could see that. He would go take out the other team’s best player when we were teammates. He would argue with some of our other better defenders saying, ‘No, no, no, I want to get on him. Let me guard him.’

Weber: Bronny made it easy to coach him in basketball. When we played lesser competition, I certainly was not going to hold him out because that would have denied the opportunity for the kids that we were playing against, to go back to their friends and family and say, ‘Man, I played against Bronny James today.’ And even when Bronny was 10, 11 or 12 years old, I don’t need to tell you that (playing against him) was a big deal. He understood. I would certainly start him in the games, and then when it got lopsided pretty quickly, which it often did, depending who we were playing, I’d sit him in the second quarter, the entire quarter, and, you know, people would say, ‘My God, LeBron was at the game. How can you sit Bronny?’ I’m like, ‘Well, LeBron James knows that when you’re up 24 after one quarter, the game’s probably not in jeopardy.’

Teunissen van Manen: When Bronny was in seventh grade, the buzz in (the basketball gym) was pretty amazing. In that year, Bronny’s year, we had him and a couple of other very good players, and the place was packed. If we had charged a fee, we would have made a fortune.

Harding: It was me, three other eighth graders and then Bronny, and all of us ended up playing a Division I sport; Bronny was the only one that ended up playing basketball. I don’t think we lost a game.

Weber: He may have been a better free-throw shooter in fifth and sixth grade than his dad was at the time. He had great mechanics, wonderful follow through. Elbow in. Even back then he took pride in playing defense. But if somebody fell down, he would help the kid up, whether it was our team or somebody else’s team. He was just a real joy to work with.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Jesse D. Garrabrant, David Liam Kyle / NBAE via Getty Images; Ethan Miller, Cassy Athena / Getty Images)