Most of us knew each other from Instagram and playing against each other,” says Jalen Hooks. The four-star forward is sitting beside a few of his newfound teammates—Jahki Howard, Chuck Bailey and Braeden Moore—explaining how exactly they all ended up at Donda Academy, the prep school created and backed by Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West. It’s December and the Donda Doves have just wrapped up practice at the team’s training facility.
Most of the players say they found out about the school after someone from Ye’s camp reached out to them and their families. “We had to make sure it was the right position for us [with] so many of the top players playing with each other,” says Hooks, lounging in a pair of YEEZY slides.
Inside the meeting room on the second floor, the rest of the team still has on the YEEZY 500s they were practicing in. Howard claims that he and Robert Dillingham were the first on the team to start wearing them in games, rocking them in the season opener against Minnesota Prep at the Target Center back in November. Ye was sitting courtside that day. Soon, the whole team caught on.
“[They’re] mad comfortable,” he says. “Only shoe I could really hoop in.”
Down the hall, Dillingham and Bryce Baker are getting a quick haircut, while the rest of the team is still downstairs, lingering around the court. There’s a pair of newly released adidas “Amber Tint” QNTMs sitting unclaimed on one of the black chairs courtside, which features a clean black and white aesthetic.
Ye’s impact is everywhere around the gym, from the team’s sleek Balenciagaproduced jerseys to their adidas sneakers to the fact that all of these elite prospects—Dillingham, Zion Cruz, JJ Taylor, Brandon White, Omarion Bodrick, Seven Bahati, Bryce Baker, Hooks, Bailey, Moore and Howard—are here because they’ve trusted his vision enough to leave their respective high school programs to play for Donda Academy instead. And yet, there’s a lot of mystery behind what exactly Donda Academy is or why the kids have all chosen to come here. People have questioned whether it’s even a real school or if the kids take actual classes. And that’s
