Prep schools are not for everyone
B.C.’s growing high school talent pool becoming ripe for out-of-province school programs
It was a stirring off-season in our B.C. high school basketball world, perhaps more so than any we can remember.
The reason: We’re growing up and our long-standing model of talent delivery, which over the past decade plus has been enhanced by a rapidly-growing club system, has suddenly become the object of desire for prep schools in both the U.S. and Canada.
At the start of every season this space is usually dedicated to B.C.’s best senior varsity boys basketball teams.
But this season, it’s impossible to do that without referencing an off-season in which a trio of players — arguably the three best in the province — elected to leave their high schools to play for basketball-specific prep schools on the other side of the continent.
Incoming Grade 11 guard Miguel Tomley of Surrey’s triple-A No. 8 Tamanawis Wildcats and senior forward Jake Cowley of Langley’s No. 1 Walnut Grove Gators each left for Ontario’s Orangeville Prep, while Grant Shephard, the senior forward and B.C. quad-A tournament MVP with the No. 2-ranked Kelowna Owls, did likewise, joining Florida’s famed Montverde Prep. It’s the same school which produced the No. 1 pick in the 2016 NBA draft in Ben Simmons, and the No. 2 pick in the 2015 draft in D’Angelo Russell.
A handful of B.C.’s other top talents also left for prep schools.
In the days that have followed, both Tomley and Shephard have remained with their teams, while Cowley, not finding the fit he was looking for, has returned home.
This past Tuesday, in an 11th-hour appeal, Cowley, who had initially been ruled ineligible to play, had that decision overturned.
“Jake’s expectation in attending a prep school wasn’t the reality,” Cowley’s father Tim told The Province, “and the family made a decision that it was best for him to return to Walnut Grove and graduate with his class.”
There have always been divisive issues within the boys basketball community.
Recruiting and the coexistence of public and private schools chasing the same championship banners have long topped the list. Now they’ve got some company. Yet this one shouldn’t be seen as muddy. In every exception, without fail, a player’s decision to leave his high school community behind in favour of a prep school should be a family’s decision and no one else’s.
That doesn’t mean they are easy decisions to make because there is something about the total social-academic-athletic experience gained through high school that can’t be replicated, with the years lost unrecoverable.
As in life, there are good prep schools and there are bad ones, just as there are players for whom the new environment is productive and others for whom it is not.
Walnut Grove head coach George Bergen, while appreciating that everyone’s prep school decision is uniquely their own, including that of his own player Cowley, wasn’t afraid to voice his opinion on the matter.
“My advice, plain and simple, is to graduate from a great high school, and then, if you want to take an extra year before major college, go to a prep school,” said Bergen, whose team will be a formidable one.
“But this is a family decision, not a coach’s decision.”
And Harry Parmar, the Kelowna head coach, who last season with Shephard in the lineup completed a 23-0 season against provincial competition, stressed that judging any player’s decision to leave for a prep school could only be done on a case-by-case basis.
“When Grant called me and we talked about it, he wasn’t going to just any team, he was going to play for the best team in the (U.S.),” said Parmar. “I don’t know what kid could ever say no to that. It was an unreal opportunity for him.
“But it’s not all roses for everybody,” continued Parmar. “You have to do your due diligence. Everything about Grant’s case is an exception, but others wind up listening to advice that might not be the best.”