One CT school, 10 tourney connections

Putnam Science Academy coach Tom Espinosa sat there at home early Sunday evening with his sons T.J. and Bryce as CBS unveiled the brackets for the men’s NCAA Tournament.

“Maryland pops up and my kids are going, ‘Eric (Ayala) is in!’ ” Espinosa said. “Drake pops us and it’s, ‘Darnell (Brodie) is in!’ They know all the guys. It just kept going. Then my phone started blowing up.”

When the brackets were filled, Espinosa counted 10 of his former players in the tournament. Ten. On Monday, there were addendums. There are 12 with ties to PSA when you count Sean Duru

gordon, an early January enrollee at Missouri who has yet to play, and Mamadou Diarra, a UConn graduate assistant whose career was cut short by chronic knee problems.

If there is a school around the nation with as many — Brewster, Montverde, another prep? — they are welcome to publicize it. It’s the most PSA ever has had.

“I’m so happy for the kids, obviously,” said Espinosa, who built the program from scratch in 2002. “It’s exciting. We’re proud of what we’ve done. It couldn’t have happened without the great support of the administration and coaches who worked hard to recruit and develop the players. We’ve been lucky with some great kids who bought into our program.”

UConn fans obviously know about Akok Akok, limited after last year’s Achilles surgery. There’s Ayala, the 6-foot-5 guard who’ll lead Maryland against the Huskies on Saturday. There are Kyle Lofton and Osun Osunniyi at St. Bonaventure. There’s Tyson Etienne, the AAC Co-Player of the Year, at Wichita State. That’s five.

There’s Brodie at Drake, Gabe McGlothan at Grand Canyon, Josh Gray at LSU, Abou Ousmane at North Texas and Vlad Goldin at

Texas Tech. That’s 10.

Some are freshman reserves. Some are upperclassman stars. Some guards. Some bigs. Some played on the PSA 2018 national prep champions. Some on the

2020 co-champs (no final game because of COVID). Some played as undergrads at PSA, some as post-grads. From New York to Russia, they show up to the tiny campus on Maple Street in this tiny town in the northeastern corner of the state.

Turkish investors bought the property in 2000 and opened PSA as an all-boys school two years later. When PSA nearly closed in 2015, Dr. Tieqiang Ding saved it. PSA is now co-ed.

To get the full experience, you need to pull up at about 3 o’clock on a September afternoon. Do not expect to be overwhelmed. That’s the beauty of it. You push open the glass door, step through the lobby of what once was an all-girls Catholic high school and enter directly into a gym that you’d expect to host a CYO tournament.

Stage on one end. A line of seats on one side. The players’ benches on the other. And on the new court? Some of the best young players around. The games in the winter certainly draw coaches, but it is September before the college season when the biggest names show for intense intra-squad pickup games.

“It’s exciting for a lot of reasons,” Espinosa said. “We’ve just moved onto campus and just starting to get going. These pickup games don’t look like pickup games. You don’t have to motivate the kids. What makes it so great is the size of the gym. These coaches people would recognize are sitting there right on top of you watching.”

On a big day there may be 50 from 35 schools gathered. Multiple coaches from a staff will come. If there’s no more room, they stand in the corner or sit up on the stage. Jim Boeheim. Jay Wright. Jim Calhoun. Dan Hurley. Ed Cooley. John Calipari. Sean Miller. Shaka Smart. The list goes on and on. Among the biggest names, Coach K, Rick Pitino and Roy Williams have not been.

Scoochie Smith, who became a star at Dayton, was the first former Mustang to play in the NCAA Tournament. He is a seminal player in program history.

“Scoochie got our name out there and helped us with recruiting,” Espinosa said. “Then Hamidou Diallo and Mamadou Diarra brought us to the level where we could almost get anybody here and win at the highest level.”

Remember how hard UConn chased Diallo before he chose Kentucky and left for the NBA after his freshman season? The 2019 NBA slam dunk champion still could be playing in college if

he wanted.

“How crazy is that?” Espinosa said.

Well, he would have gotten Calipari into the tournament.

Lofton, St. Bonaventure’s leading scorer, had 23 points and Osunniyi, the Bonnies’ leading rebounder, had 14 points and 12 rebounds in the A-10 championship victory over VCU. They will play LSU, where Gray is a 7-0 freshman backup.

“Osun had originally committed to La Salle, coming here from a small school in New Jersey,” Espinosa said. “He was sort of a hidden gem. I remember his family coming up, they were so excited. I can tell you Osun really struggled his first semester here. But that second semester he really took off and ended up the MVP of the

2018 national championship game.

“A coach from Merrimack, which was Division II at the time, said we should really look at Kyle. They didn’t offer him, because he couldn’t really shoot it. So Kyle didn’t even have a Division II offer coming out of high school. We thought he was really good. You see where he is now, people are talking NBA radar. Unbelievable. Yeah, the knock on him was he couldn’t shoot.”

Lofton shot over 40 percent on 3s as the point guard on the 2018 national champs and, Espinosa pointed out, he hit four of five 3s against

VCU.

Brodie played two years at PSA, struggled to find minutes at Seton Hall and found his stride at Drake. He’s averaging nearly eight points and a team-high 7.2 rebounds. In a play-in game Thursday he will come face to face with Etienne, who’s averaging 17 points for Wichita State.

“Tyson is the hardest worker we have ever had,” Espinosa said. “Special.”

Ayala, who leads Maryland at 14.9 points a game, was one of PSA’s premier guards for two years. Oregon, Memphis, UConn before Espinosa said it kind of backed off, lots of schools wanted him. Syracuse wanted him in the worst way. He chose Maryland. He also chose to do his post-grad year at IMG Academy.

“Over the years, we’ve gotten kids as post-grads after they’d been somewhere else for two years — and vice versa,” Espinosa said. “Being at the same boarding school for three years, it’s almost good for the coaches and players to move on.

“When he called and explained it, we agreed it was best for him. Eric is a great kid. I still talk to him and his mom.”

AAU coaches make recommendations to Espinosa, yet more and more it’s college coaches. PSA will recruit players in late March, April, May. Those are the crazy months. He tries to have a team set by July, saving a couple of spots for the late summer or early fall.

“We get these kids first time away from home, from their families and friends, the city,” Espinosa said. “They go through a lot. There’s adversity. And you’re the one there for them. You grow together. It can be tough. I can’t tell you how many times kids have struggled and wanted to pack and up leave.

“There’s no prom. There are no dances. They’re not with their buddies at home. It’s a whole different life.

Most of them have big goals and dreams, so they’ve already sacrificed. This is a different sacrifice. Not just our prep school, if you make it through, you’ve grown a lot as a person, a player, a student.”

On his current team, Bensley Joseph, rated the No. 2 player in New England, is going to Miami. Alexis Reyes: East Carolina. Mohamed Sanogo: Florida International. Nana Owusu-Anane: Brown. Nic Louis-Jacques: Colgate. Bryce Harris: Howard. Elijah Hutchins-Everett: Penn State. Leon Williams: Gardner-Webb. Josh Bascoe: Bucknell.

Espinosa said they were in the dorm Sunday watching the brackets announced. They know they’re next.