A maroon high-school basketball jersey worn by Kobe Bryant as a teenager has sold for $2,176,000 at Sotheby's, setting a record for any high-school jersey ever sold at auction. The Lower Merion High School uniform, bearing Bryant's number 33, drew 26 bids from seven collectors before closing on 28 October 2026, comfortably passing its pre-sale estimate of $1 million to $2 million.

The jersey dates from Bryant's junior season at Lower Merion, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and has been matched to a game against Hazleton Area in March 1995. It comes from the collection of Pamela Bryant, the player's mother, and last changed hands in 2013, when it sold at Goldin Auctions for $51,400. In thirteen years its value has risen roughly forty-fold.

The result beats the previous record for a high-school basketball jersey, set in 2024 when a St. Vincent-St. Mary jersey worn by LeBron James on the cover of Sports Illustrated's Chosen One issue sold for $1.3 million. Sotheby's described the Lower Merion jersey as one of the earliest game-worn Bryant jerseys to surface publicly, predating his NBA career and the Mamba persona that followed.

Sports memorabilia has become an increasingly prominent category for the major auction houses, and this sale underlines how far its top tier has travelled. A piece of schoolboy kit that sold for a five-figure sum a decade ago now commands a price closer to a museum-quality painting, driven by collectors chasing the earliest artefacts of a sporting icon's career.