COMMENTARY
On Saturday night at the Spiece Fieldhouse in Fort Wayne, Ind., 206 miles from the Loop, four Chicago-based club teams are playing simultaneously in the the 17-and-under bracket.
It was the second round and the terms were now sudden death. The emotions, the intensity, were ratcheted up more than normal. The Mac Irvin Fire squared against a team from Iowa. The Illinois Bobcats, a team primarily composed of south suburban players, played in the court adjacent to theirs.
Directly behind the Fire, Mean Streets played a Kansas City, Mo., group. The Illinois Wolves completed the quartet, playing on the court situated behind the Bobcats.
The Fire eventually won the tournament on Sunday (especially impressive given the absence due to injury of Crandall Head, its most talented player). The Wolves qualified for the quarterfinals. The Bobcats and Mean Streets lost their respective games Saturday night and exited the tournament.
The outcomes of the games certainly matter, but the format allows greater chances to isolate players and directly address their strengths and weaknesses.
Richards’ Shaun Pratl, a top player on the Bulldogs’ 4A state champion, plays with Mean Streets. He is also a football prospect and that gives him toughness. Pratl has a purity about his game, efficient, direct, clean, that’s a joy to watch.
In succession he makes a perfect interior feed to a teammate for a layup. He blocks out his man at the other end, and posts up and shows the ability to drive and finish with an up and under move.
The nature of scouting is to fall in love with players. I like the way he plays. A scout I know is more muted. "All he does is finish," he said.
Basketball is either solitary, the lone player shooting jump shots on his driveway, or communal. The existence of regional and national tournaments underscores the explosive growth and popularity of offseason or travel team basketball.
Club basketball is fundamentally about supply and demand. The reality is, the kids want to play and they demand some semblance of structure. A team from Arkansas drove 11 hours and played the first game Friday night. The corporate presence of club basketball remains problematic and troublesome, though corporations have helped modernize and propelled the game forward.
High school basketball gave rise to the self-style, the self-anointed, but that entrepreneur tenacity also helps to explain how we have arrived at this particular end point.
Mac Irvin worked for 22-years in the corporate division of Xerox. Known as the Godfather, Irvin is now the emeritus professor of his self-titled empire. The Fire bears his name, but he delegates authority. Two of his sons, Mike and Nick, coach the 17-under team.
Irvin was trained in business culture, but he is also a man born and bred on the South Side. He believes players’ toughness and competitive is best utilized by playing beyond their immediate age range.
"Mr. Irvin always believes that kids should play one-level above their own age group, and that’s the best way for them to improve," said Terry Johnson, a coach for the 16-under team.
His son, also named Terry, a junior at St. Rita, is one of the best players on the 17-team. The best prospects on the 16-team are two freshmen, Curie’s Wayne Blackshear and Young’s Sam Thompson. The 15-under team was stocked with seventh- and eighth-graders. The primacy of youth is now the dominant narrative of high school basketball. It is the animating spirit of recruiting in which the cut-throat stakes are driving coaches to seek commitments from younger and younger athletes. The University of Kentucky set a new precedent by securing the oral commitment of an eighth grader this weekend.
After falling to land the state’s top prospects the last five years, Illinois changed gears by more aggressively courting younger and younger prospects. The Illini have already secured commitments of the two best sophomores, Rich South’s Crandall Head and Waukegan’s Jereme Richmond.
What it all suggests is that the developmental model for younger players has shifted away from the team and moved aggressively toward the individual.
Club programs like NLP, Full Package and Rising Stars promote their facilities and emphasize a culture of "training." The fascinating part is that basketball players are now closer to tennis players, gymnasts or swimmers.
The best prospects follow the trajectories of swimmer Michael Phelps. They are identified and cultivated at increasingly younger ages, separated from their peers and immersed in their sport at the exclusion of everything else.
They are given a platform at a very young age. Mike Shaw is an interesting example. He first gained notoriety playing up with the Fire last year in advance of his freshman year De La Salle.
A 6-8 post player who has the skills to play on both the perimeter and the inside, Shaw has made a national reputation based on his performance at the Kingwood Classic in Houston and the King James Classic in Akron, Ohio.
One college coach called De La Salle coach Tom White and told him Shaw is one of the country’s top-five prospects in the class of 2011 because of his versatility.
Shaw had several jaw dropping moments against the Storm. During one first-half sequence, he drives the right baseline, elevates and midair switches the ball to his left arm to ward off a player trying to block his shot. The ball smoothly flips off the glass and in.
Moments later, Shaw converted consecutive three-pointers. Recruiting analyst Roy Schmidt said Shaw is the top freshman in Illinois, and "there’s a lot of separation between him and No. 2 [Blackshear]."
For a national perspective, I ask New York-based evaluator Tom Konchalski of his impressions.
"He’s very fluid, an excellent shooter, good bounce off the floor and he shows that he has the ability to put the ball on the floor and score getting to the basket. Right now, he’s a little too enamored with the three-point shot. Six-foot-eight is a great attribute in basketball. He needs to show that more and play more of an inside/out game than the other way around."
Shaw’s value is measured in different ways, as both a coveted college recruit but also a magnet for drawing other talent to play around him. De La Salle is already a highly desirable team to program for top events, like next year’s McDonald’s City-Suburban Showdown with Glenbrook North.
Several young players at Spiece indicated a preference to play at De La Salle because of the opportunity to play with Shaw.
Schmidt says the four best prospects in Illinois are sophomores Head, Richmond, Zion-Benton’s Lenzelle Smith and freshman Shaw.
"I like them better than any players from the class of 2009, as prospects," he said.
High school basketball here almost parallels the college game. The older you are, the more questions that surround your ability and talent. Illinois’s recruiting resurgence is predicated on gaining instant impact from top-rated players from that class, including Warren’s Brandon Paul, Sterling’s Joseph Bertrand and Peoria Central’s DJ Richardson.
It is Head, Richmond and a reported offer to Shaw that has generated more excitement. Paul did not even play varsity until his junior year, a fact that no doubt accounts for lingering suspicions about his status as an elite player.
Thompson is the hot new prospect, Schmidt’s No. 4 rated freshman. The club team tournaments are functioning as his coming-out party after a year spent in relative obscurity playing on the Young sophomore team. Young coach Tyrone Slaughter, who was at Spiece watching Thompson and several other players from his program, said Thompson is not likely to play varsity basketball as a sophomore.
"For me the most important thing was getting acclimated to high school," said Thompson. "We had a great [sophomore] team and I was happy to be a part of that. I don’t think I was ready to play varsity as a freshman. My dad didn’t want me to take the [physical] pounding.
"The only time I felt any regret was in the state tournament, when I was not there and I could not do anything to help the team [against Mount Carmel in the Class 4A sectional final]. But I just have to wait my turn. My time will come.”
Konchalski also admired Thompson’s athleticism and his mid-range game, but would like to see him improve his off-hand and learn to score more off the dribble. Young’s most talented returning players are guards and wing forwards in Marcus Jordan, Anthony Johnson and Ahmad Starks.
By staying on the sophomore team, Thompson is playing against less skilled opponents, but his body is given time to grow and develop. He is also more likely to help improve his areas of weakness.
"In my four years, we only had one kid who played varsity as a freshman, and that was Chris [Colvin]. He had the body, the maturity to play against that level of competition, and we needed him," said Slaughter. "Do I agree with the Simeon philosophy of never playing a freshman on the varsity? No, but I do agree with the theory in principle. Too many kids believe it is their mandate to come in and play on the varsity as freshmen."
Thompson understands. "I want to do well and show what I can do. The [national] rankings are important, but mostly, I want to win. That’s the most important thing to me, winning," he said.
His turn on the varsity is perhaps one of delayed gratification. It is not likely to hurt his standing. "Only God knows who the top ten sophomores in the country are," said Konchalski. "And He’s not talking."
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