The son of five time NBA Champion Ron Harper, Sr, and the brother of Detroit Pistons two-way swing man, Ron Harper, Jr., Dylan Harper has had first hand experience of what it takes to be a professional athlete and in fact, those early lessons were an independent study class that he’s been enrolled in long before he walked through the doors of Rutgers-Busch Campus in Piscataway, New Jersey. While Dylan Harper shares that both his dad and brother are a wealth of knowledge for him, he admits that there is one more person who is part of that nucleus: his mother, Maria Harper who played college basketball at the University of New Orleans and is now an assistant coach at Don Bosco Prep. “I think we all work collectively just to tell me to Keep grinding and stuff like that, you know,” Dylan Harper tells me. “They give me the inside stuff of everything. My brother is probably my biggest inspiration for me because I was in those gyms with him those long mornings — early mornings and long nights of just him working out and grinding, grinding, grinding. So I mean, he’s definitely the one that I looked up to the most.”