PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — One of the 76ers’ home-grown talents, Justin Edwards, received a big honor Wednesday morning, when the elementary school gym where he once played was renamed for him.
Students in the gym at Mastery Charter Smedley Elementary School in the city’s Frankford section shrieked as the Sixers' 6-foot-7 forward pulled down the covering over a sign reading “Justin Edwards Gym.”
Before playing at Philadelphia's Imhotep Institute Charter High School, the University of Kentucky and the Sixers, Edwards — albeit when he was much shorter — started his hoops career at Mastery-Smedley in 2011. He says it's an honor to come back.
"This is a surreal feeling, honestly,” he said. “This is one of the first schools I went to when I started playing basketball, so just to be able to come back and give the little younger generation hope and let them know that anything is possible is a really good feeling."
Assistant Principal Isaac Hebron watched the young Edwards develop his academic and basketball skills. “I came in this building when he was in third grade,” he said, “and he was this kid that really liked to work hard at school, but also in this gym.”
For a class assignment, Edwards wrote that he wanted to be an NBA player. He told reporters it was a surreal feeling to return after that young vision became reality.
"Everybody dreams to make it to the NBA, but I never really believed it until I got to a certain point in my basketball journey,” he said.
"We really wanted to do this for not only him but it's for all of our students here to kind of motivate them and show them this is where dreams begin. He actually made the dream come true."
Hebron said naming the gym for Edwards shows current students that it is a place where dreams can begin.
“He actually made the dream come true.”
