Bard basketball players Yonah Greenstein, right, and Jeremy Arnstein oversee stretching at the Dream to Achieve Basketball Camp this past summer.

By Jim Sheahan
Bard College Sports Information Director

Watching Bard senior Yonah Greenstein practice his ball-handling skills before a basketball game is like watching a Las Vegas card dealer warm up for an eight-hour shift.

Greenstein goes through a routine that borders on optical illusion. The ball goes through his legs, behind his back, he kneels on the floor, he stands ... it's in front of him, it's behind him ... it's three feet off the ground, it's two inches off the ground ... and all the while it looks like the ball is tethered to his hand.

In fact, any time Greenstein is near a basketball, he picks it up and starts dribbling it. He can't help himself.

So any time you're in the Stevenson Gymnasium building on the Bard campus, you'll know Greenstein is there if you hear the sound of a basketball being dribbled in the hallway, up the stairs, near the athletic training room, in the laundry room, in the coach's office, or near the fitness center. You may occasionally hear it in the gym, too.

Yonah Greenstein has done a lot more than play basketball at Bard.

That's why it made perfect sense to him to hold a youth basketball clinic in the hallways of a middle school when the gym was not available. Who needs a basket for basketball practice? Certainly not him.

It all started in the spring of his freshman year, when he helped found a program in the Trustee Leader-Scholar (TLS) program at Bard. The TLS program provides opportunities for motivated students to develop organizational and leadership skills through the design and implementation of service projects that promote involvement in campus life and cultivate relationships between Bard and its surrounding communities, local and global.

Called the Hudson Basketball Clinic, the idea was to hold weekly clinics for students in the Hudson City School District. Many students in that area are underprivileged, come from low-income families and have no real connection to a college or university setting.

In the spring of his freshman year, Greenstein went with basketball players David Polett and Justin White, who have since graduated from Bard, to talk to a guidance counselor in the Hudson district about the program. The meeting ended without a location for the clinic, but the trio bumped into the people who run the After School Program for the school district, Kathy Clark and Mike Fulton.

“They told us to come that Friday and do a clinic,” Greenstein recounted. “We did it in the halls because the gym was busy. We did some warmup stuff, some ball-handling drills, passing, some more advanced stuff to challenge them. We became experts at running the halls because if we ended up getting to use a basket in the gym, it was a luxury.”

With the help of Clark and Fulton, the weekly clinic has become a staple in the Hudson After School program, and it led to Greenstein's creation of the Dream to Achieve basketball camp, which gives many of those same students a summer camp experience with one overnight on the Bard campus.

Behind the scenes through all this time, Greenstein has maintained his studies, played as the starting point guard on the men's basketball team, and taken over the fundraising responsibilities for the camp. He's one of the captains of the basketball team this season.

“If you really want to do something, you make time for it,” Greenstein said. “It's basketball, and I love working with kids. The best way I can connect with them is through basketball, which is what I love the most.”

Youths participate in agility drills in one of the quads on the Bard College campus as part of the Dream to Achieve Basketball Camp.

He doesn't do it without help, but he's the driving force. Current Bard players Jeremy Arnstein, Lamar Powell and Alvaro Llanes have played pivotal roles, as have women's basketball players Imani Jones and Victoria Fleisher. Bard assistant professor of biology Philip Johns donated his time to spend the better part of the day with Dream to Achieve campers, conducting a workshop outside.

He and Arnstein have gone door-to-door visiting Hudson businesses, who donate money or gift certificates to support the camp. On the clinic side, a grant from 21st Century and Advantage is funding the After School programs for the Hudson district. The camp was paid for through fundraising and a donation from The Tillow Fund.

With his final collegiate basketball season set to begin on Nov. 15, Greenstein feels strongly that the TLS program and the camp need to continue after he graduates in May.

“I want to leave it the hands of someone on the basketball team, and there are a bunch of them who would be good at that,” Greenstein said. “There's always a possibility that I'm going to stay in the area. I'm trying to expand the camp to three weeks and to do a weekend clinic which will include a free breakfast for the kids in the spring.

“The primary goal is to stress the importance of hard work and discipline,” Greenstein said. “The more they think about going to college, the more realistic is becomes for them.”

Dream to Achieve campers take a break from working on skills to mug for the camera in Bard's Stevenson Gymnasium.

The real kicker here is that more than 50 percent of the clinic participants and the campers aren't really all that interested in basketball. They enjoy the experience of hanging out with a college student, being on a college campus, and having access to a swimming pool over the summer.

Many of the clinic participants and campers come to 4-5 Bard games a year; and Greenstein will attend a few modified or junior varsity games, to support the young people he's come to care about over the years.

“It would be wrong to just set this up and then just leave,” Greenstein continued. “It would defeat the whole purpose of it. It's a low-income, isolated area, and many of those kids don't really get a chance to get out of Hudson. The After School program does a great job of engaging them; a lot of them don't think of college as a realistic option in their lives.”

It's that truth that seems to drive Greenstein the most. He appears most affected by the students who attend the summer camp and ask him if they can live at Bard, and he smiles warmly when he recalls watching them eat 4-5 plates of food in one sitting at Kline Commons, the dining facility on campus.

“Most of them aren't basketball players,” Greenstein said. “They're just kind of exploring and experiencing something different, and I like helping them out.”

To read more about the Hudson City School District After School program, click here.
To visit the Dream to Achieve web site, click here.
To make a donation, e-mail Yonah Greenstein at yg618@bard.edu