No. 1 Montverde Academy hosts historic NIBC event
Eagles coach Kevin Boyle said ‘all the good players in high school basketball will want to play in this league’
Another chapter in the ever-changing landscape of high school basketball unfolds this week with national No. 1 Montverde Academy hosting four nationally ranked teams, including second-ranked IMG Academy of Bradenton and No. 3 Sunrise Christian of Kansas, for a six-game weekend of play for the highest-level league in the history of high school sports.
The fourth team in the event, Oak Hill Academy of Virginia, is No. 8 in this week’s Ball is Life Fab 50 rankings.
The National Interscholastic Basketball Conference, founded last season largely to assure its teams could safely play a season impacted by COVID19, looks more like a major college conference than a high school league. It has eight powerhouse programs from seven different states — all striving to stock their rosters with the nation’s best players.
Montverde coach Kevin Boyle, architect of a program that has dominated with six national championships in the past nine seasons, said the NIBC, buoyed by its partnership with media giant ESPN, is the worldwide leader in high school basketball.
“Most of the best players in high school are in the league,” Boyle said to The Orlando Sentinel in the preseason. With top talent, competition and media exposure, he added, it won’t be long before “all the good players in high school basketball will want to play in this league.”
That remains to be seen in an era when specialized basketball academies are popping up everywhere and the new Overtime Elite professional franchise is signing top prospects to leave high schools early and pay for play. But the NIBC does have 11 of the top 24 senior prospects on ESPN’s Class of 2022 recruit rankings, including No. 3 Keyonte George, a 6-foot-3
IMG guard who signed with Baylor.
Six of those 11 top NIBC prospects are at Montverde, including the Eagles’ only three returners from a 24-1 national title team.
Dariq Whitehead, a 6-foot-6 Eagles veteran ranked No. 5, signed with Duke. The other holdovers are No. 23 Malik Renau (Florida), a 6-8 forward, and 6-5 guard No. 24 Jalen Hood-Schifino (Indiana).
Additions to the lineup include No. 11 Vincent Iwuchukwu, a 7-1 USC signee; No. 16 Skyy Clark (Kentucky), a highly touted guard who is not expected to play until January after undergoing knee surgery; and No. 18 Dillon Mitchell (Texas), a dynamic 6-7 athlete.
The Eagles easily won two preseason games at home and opened the regular season with two wins in Atlanta last weekend. But the degree of difficulty revs up now as Week 2 of the FHSAA basketball season revs up with the NIBC games, plus two events that showcase traditional high school teams: the Rotary Tip-Off Classic and the Breast Cancer Awareness Classic.
Boyle, who is 268-18 in 10 seasons at Montverde, said his early challenge is adapting new players to a system that prioritizes energy, intensity and defense.
“Usually, that takes time to develop,” Boyle noted. He added that avoiding losses will be a tall task if the Eagles don’t “get it right quickly.”
Montverde has won 51 of its past 52 games. But Boyle said the Eagles will play 14 games against teams in the top 14 of the Fab 50 preseason rankings. That includes two NIBC dates with IMG and Sunrise.
Montverde plays Oak Hill on Thursday at 7:30, IMG Friday at 8 and Sunrise on Saturday at 7 as each team plays the other three.
The four other NIBC members, No. 16 Wasatch Academy of Utah, No. 22 La Lumiere of Indiana, No. 43 Legacy Early College of South Carolina and Bishop Walsh of Maryland, are playing a similar set of games at Allegany College in Cumberland, Maryland.
ESPNU will televise Thursday’s IMG vs. Sunrise opener at 5 p.m. followed by a Legacy-Wasatch game in Maryland. The rest of the games will be streamed on the ESPN+ subscription web site.
ESPN is scheduled to televise or stream 38 regular season NIBC games.
Montverde will make trips to Arizona (Dec. 9-10), Indiana (Jan. 6-8) and New Jersey (Feb. 4-5) for future NIBC weekends.