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OAKLAND — Draymond Green and his Saginaw High basketball teammates were sitting in the bleachers listening to assistant coach Bruce Simmons. That, Green remembers.

“I can’t remember the exact speech, because usually when you hear a speech you take one thing away from it,” Green recalled Wednesday. “Then (Simmons) threw a basketball, and it almost touched the ceiling of the gym. And the ball came down — bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce. And then it rolled away. We were all sitting there like, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘That was your career. One day the ball is going to stop bouncing. What are you going to have to fall back on?’”

Green, the Golden State Warriors‘ effervescent power forward, visited Oakland High on Wednesday, sitting in on a computer coding class and addressing an assembly in the school’s gym. Takeaways for the students fortunate enough to cross his path? Start with having an NBA All-Star and Olympic gold medal winner sitting in your class being coached on how to write an app and then having him sign your Warriors Code T-shirt (while smiling for a photo) on his way out the door.

“I never learned anything like coding,” he told the class. “I think it’s important. Our entire world is driven by computers. As basketball has taken me many places, computers can take you so many places.”

At the assembly, he again homed in on the importance of education.

“In ninth grade I was the class clown,” he told the students. “It went south real quick. I think I finished the year with a 2.1 (GPA). My mom took me off the basketball team. That was kind of a lesson for me. It was like, all right, your grades suck, so now you can’t play basketball. It showed me how important education was and how important it was to take that side of it seriously.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better candidate to interact with high school students than Green. He’s engaging. And he’s real, having taken a wrong turn or two along the road to fame and fortune. Class clown being one. The overzealous physicality that earned him a one-game suspension during last June’s NBA Finals being another. Say this about Green — he tends to understand when he has stepped on a rake, and he seems to take good advice to heart. He also tends to speak from the heart, such as when he says he likes Oakland because it reminds him of Saginaw.

Said Oakland High Principal Matin Abdel-Qawi, as he watched Green enliven the coding class: “It shows our students, our scholars, that they’re valued, that they’re appreciated. If you look over there and see the smile on Draymond’s face, he’s having fun. He’s connecting with young people. They get motivated. This kind of stuff changes lives.”

Wednesday’s visit was co-sponsored by two initiatives: Warriors Code, which seeks to bring computer science to underrepresented Bay Area Students, and Code.org, a Seattle-based nonprofit that has introduced coding to more than 272 million students in 180 countries.

“It’s the language of the now,” Abdel-Qawi said. “We need to make sure that the scholars of color, black and brown, from Oakland can compete in the job market along with everyone else.”

Back to Green’s memory of high school and the ball that stopped bouncing: He told the students he is already planning his life after hoops and has taken an active interest in real estate and tech companies.

“It’s important because we in the NBA call it Father Time, and Father Time is undefeated,” he said, smiling. “It’s going to catch up to us all one day. And what’s next for you is very, very important.”