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I married a girl from a different country and left the USA about 15 years ago, now one of her cousin's kids (who I'll just call my nephew for convenience) has received a scholarship to play basketball for a private high school in the US. I'm super stoked for him, and things seem to be going pretty well at the moment (he's a starter and the team is playing tournaments non-stop) but I've got a bunch of questions and I don't want to ask his mom because she's in way over her head with just the day-to-day details like phones, credit cards, international money transfers, etc. and she's pretty stressed out because her firstborn is now thousands of miles away and it all happened pretty quickly and I don't want to make her worry about it any more than she already is. I don't want to say anything that could personally identify him because I don't want any of my bullshit speculation being traced back to him in any way. He plays basketball for the national team (U-18s) and they organised a trip to some kind of basketball camp in the US last summer. Some recruiter spotted him and said, hey, you should play ball over here. He was all set to go and then some personal beef happened between the recruiter and the school or one recruiter and another one (apparently there's a local guy here and then a US counterpart) and the first school fell through. The local recruiter got him into another school though so he was able to start the school year on time. He turned 18 a few months ago and he entered school as a junior. The biggest question for me is, where's the money coming from? He's getting two years of room and board paid to play high school basketball. I assume that someone's going to get a payout if he gets recruited by a ~top~ college? Will he be able to freely pick his school or will his recruiter have some kind of deal already lined up? I know the answer is "Check the contract, dummy" but like I said earlier, I don't want to stress his mom out. So I'm hoping that someone who knows something about the HS-->NCAA pipeline can give some general answers that may or may not be applicable to this specific case.
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Dec 2, 2019 00:13
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| # ? May 4, 2024 18:38 |
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OK so I guess this was pretty specialised and also totally vague, so does anyone have any sites where I could check for scouting reports on him or his school, videos, match reports, anything at all? One of his teammates is on Rivals, 247sports and ESPN, so there's stuff out there but I wouldn't know where to look. The school's website doesn't have jack about the basketball program (more about Christian values) and the search results just don't seem to come up with anything current. There's also a university with the same name that creeps in. I've asked him but he doesn't really know anything, he's pretty wiped out by all the travel, playing and school, it's more than what he was used to. There are a couple of videos he's shared and I follow those accounts but I only get to see him at Christmas and I can't really hassle him on Instagram. I want to have like web alerts set up for him and stuff so I can really follow him. Any advice for following HS basketball from afar is greatly appreciated.
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Dec 5, 2019 00:34
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No it’s not really vague, there’s just a lot of shady stuff around high school/aau ball and probably no one who isn’t directly involved could explain all the details. Many of these “academies” literally don’t even have any teachers, they send the kids to nearby public high schools for classes and have an enrollment of just the players. It’s a wild world
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Dec 5, 2019 00:40
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Yeah, I expected it would be shady but I was hoping there might be a verneer of legitimacy to it. Only info I found on his coach is that he's CEO of some basketball academy that is linked to the HS somehow (like you said) and in 2000 he was fired from a professional coaching job for running things like a boot camp and pissing all the players off. Sounds like he's still doing things more or less the same :/. Anyway, one of the top HS players in the country (he just committed to a school) is playing at the school for the rest of this year so that should get my nephew in front of some extra scouts at least.
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Dec 5, 2019 00:57
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