Prep schools grow as source for Wichita State’s basketball recruiting

Prep schools once conjured images of ivy-covered New England campuses grooming elite students for Ivy League universities or military academies in the South.

That was before the business of basketball at prep schools got big.

Now prep schools are also well-known as recruiting hotbeds for college basketball. Wichita State has six players on its roster from a prep school or post-graduate team (although definitions can vary) and signed guard C.J. Keyser from Brewster (N.H.) Academy to add to next season’s roster.

WSU’s 2013 Final Four team did not have a player who came directly from prep school to the Shockers. Coach Gregg Marshall recruited prep schools while at Winthrop, in South Carolina, because it made geographic sense. At WSU, he recruits prep schools because that is where the players are — and it makes geographic sense.

“Those guys come in, they’re a year older, hopefully a year more mature,” Marshall said. “It takes some discipline to be at those places. You have a little bit more of a seasoned veteran, if you will, in many areas than you would for a guy coming out of high school.”

No. 9 WSU (1-1) plays Emporia State at 2 p.m. Saturday at Koch Arena, a game that is an exhibition for the NCAA Division II Hornets. Shockers guard Fred VanVleet, hobbled by a strained left hamstring, has not practiced since playing Tuesday in a loss at Tulsa and Marshall said he does not expect VanVleet to play.

The rise of Sunrise Christian Academy’s prep school and post-graduate teams is also a driving factor in WSU’s recruiting. The Bel Aire school is 4.7 miles from Koch Arena and its location is a bonus for WSU’s recruiting.

In 2013, WSU sophomore Zach Brown came to Sunrise to play for the post-graduate team, starting a connection to WSU. This season, Brown, sophomore Rauno Nurger, freshman Eric Hamilton and freshman Brett Barney — as well as assistant coach Kyle Lindsted — are Sunrise products at WSU. Keyser spent a year at Sunrise before transferring to Brewster.

Sunrise offers a post-graduate team — all players are high school graduates taking a fifth year — and an elite high school team that plays a national schedule and both attract numerous NCAA Division I recruits.

Hargrave (Va.) Military Academy sent sophomore Rashard Kelly and freshman Ty Taylor to WSU.

Taylor played four years at Grandview (Mo.) High and said he gave Texas a non-binding commitment late in his senior year in 2014. When Texas filled up on scholarships, the coaches told him he could choose another college or go to prep school and reclassify to the class of 2015.

Taylor chose Hargrave to improve his college options and prove he could play point guard.

“I came down and shot the ball,” Taylor said. “I wasn’t running the team.”

WSU didn’t recruit Taylor out of high school. His visits to Hargrave convinced Marshall that Taylor possessed potential as a point guard.

“He got a little bit bigger on their weight program,” Marshall said. “He can score. He needs to learn how to run a team, and he did some of that at Hargrave.”

Taylor enjoyed high school because he played with his friends and the community supported the team. Traveling to Virginia and playing in unfamiliar surroundings for a new coach took an adjustment period. He didn’t like the stigma of a prep school and worried people would think he didn’t make grades or didn’t get recruited.

“All the the guys I played with in high school are still my best friends,” he said. “Then I went across the country, 18 hours if you drive, to Virginia where no one knew me. The coaches didn’t even really know me. It was kind of, almost, an audition.”

A year later, however, he calls it a great decision.

“It opened up a lot of doors,” he said. “Offers started coming through the doors, because I wasn’t highly touted in that class of 2014.”

Wichita State is not alone with increasing number of prep school recruits. Coaches go where good players play, and in growing numbers those players are at prep schools. The Tornado Alley Classic last weekend in Wichita featured prep school or post-graduate teams from California, Texas, Florida, Canada and Kansas. The talent included three of the top-12 ranked players in the class of 2016, by Rivals.com, and three of the top seven in the class of 2017.

“Prep schools have always been around,” said Eric Bossi, Rivals.com national basketball analyst. “They were more in the Northeast and they were true, traditional prep schools. They started building basketball teams, and it spread.”

Prep schools attract talent with four selling points:

▪  They allow an athlete to grow physically and mentally without costing them a season of NCAA Division I eligibility, unlike a junior college.

▪  Since many schools are used to working with NCAA Division I recruits, coaches and counselors are accustomed to dealing with NCAA academic rules for core courses and other requirements.

▪  A player who isn’t satisfied with scholarship offers out of high school can attempt to upgrade with a fifth year.

▪  Playing and practicing against numerous NCAA Division I athletes offers athletes a chance to improve against strong competition.

“You’re effectively getting a redshirt year out of them, without doing it,” Bossi said. “They’re playing national schedules, many of them with teams that have multiple — five, six, seven, eight — Division I athletes. They’re theoretically getting kids that are much more used to the travel and the competition.”

Other Missouri Valley Conference teams feature a sprinkling of players with prep school or post-graduate experience — MiKyle McIntosh and Deontae Hawkins at Illinois State, Ronnie Suggs at Bradley and Sean Lloyd and Austin Weiher at Southern Illinois. Some athletes attend a prep school for that fifth year of experience; others head to a prep school earlier.

“Look at any roster across the country and you won't see a lot of kids who started and finished at their local high school,” Bossi said. “A lot of them will have transferred at some point. More and more, it's to a prep school.”

Prep schools come in many different forms, some with strong academic reputations and educational missions and a few that seem to exist solely to prop up a basketball roster.

When WSU associate athletic director Korey Torgerson read about the Tornado Alley Classic coming to Wichita, he enlisted the help of the NCAA and the MVC enforcement and compliance staffs to help him determine if Shockers coaches could recruit at the event. He faxed and emailed questionnaires to the six schools to judge if the team is considered “scholastic” or “non-scholastic.”

The questions sought to determine if the basketball team was connected to the school and if athletes were enrolled at the school. If two schools judged “non-scholastic” are playing, NCAA Division I coaches are not allowed to watch. He got replies from five, enough for him to give WSU coaches the go-ahead. Torgerson said an NCAA compliance staff member was at the event.

“We’ve been recruiting kids from prep schools that have a core course list,” Torgerson said. “The most important thing is … do they have a list of core courses with the NCAA eligibility center? If they don’t have a list of core courses, that can be problematic with respect to them meeting NCAA initial eligibility requirements.”

Former Wichita State star Jason Perez wants to add LIFE Academy, a Christian prep school in Wichita, to the list of prominent prep schools. Formerly named Word of Life, the school hired Perez in July. He has nine players on his post-graduate team, including guard Dyaire Holt, of Albany, N.Y., who signed with Coppin State. He also has players from Cameroon, Serbia, Bahamas and Nigeria.

Within five years, Perez wants his team to play the top schools in the nation.

“I want to build a national basketball program with good kids,” he said. “I get to build a program, almost from the ground up.”

This story was originally published November 20, 2015 at 6:34 PM with the headline "Prep schools grow as source for Wichita State’s basketball recruiting."