Freshmen get early jump on college
Helping Pitt, but could be in high school
It’s bound to come up at some point, whether it’s on one of Pitt’s game broadcasts, from Panthers coach Jeff Capel as he puts the struggles or successes of his team in context, or from an opposing coach after a game, their voices tinged with admiration and astonishment.
These guys are supposed to be in high school right now.
Indeed, it’s an unavoidable yet occasionally overlooked aspect of the basketball journeys of Pitt freshmen Trey McGowens and Au’Diese Toney. Under different, perhaps even normal circumstances, both would be immersed in the final weeks of their high school careers. Instead, they’re starting for an ACC team, playing against the likes of Duke and North Carolina on national television, and stand as symbols of hope for a rebuilding program.
In the ever-evolving world of college basketball, their story is increasingly common. Reclassifying — the process of changing one’s high school class status, often to begin college one year earlier — has become more prevalent in recruiting, prompting coaches to explore different ways to build their rosters and broadening prospects’ choices in making the biggest decision of their young lives.
“It’s just given them different options, and it requires them to do some working and digging to see what players could potentially do this and then provide advice in to some of the kids so they know how to academically be able to do it,” said Evan Daniels, 247 Sports’ director of basketball recruiting. “It’s flipping over every stone and seeing what players have a desire to do this type of thing.”
It’s a route that has been utilized in recent years by some of the biggest names in the sport, from Andrew Wiggins to Karl-Anthony Towns to Andre Drummond. Current Duke star R.J. Barrett and Sacramento Kings rookie Marvin Bagley III, both of whom Capel helped recruit to Duke, reclassified. Anthony Edwards, a top-three recruit nationally, announced last November he was moving from the 2020 class into 2019.
The scenarios that push a player to reclassify
vary.
Some are moving back to their original class. Others had to repeat a grade. In a sport that has grown more global over the past two decades, some recruits are coming from countries like Canada where schools employ a different time scale to advance students through grades than their American counterparts.
McGowens and Toney reflect the multitude of paths that exist. After three years at Wren High School in Piedmont, S.C., McGowens transferred to Hargrave Military Academy in Virginia, in part to improve the number of scholarship offers he would get from major-conference programs.
Even as he did that, rising among the top 100 prospects nationally, he remained in the 2019 class before Capel arrived at Pitt. Capel offered McGowens a scholarship after watching tape of him and preached the early playing time and development he would receive by joining the Panthers one year earlier.
“I knew I wanted to go,” McGowens said. “The quicker I came to college, the quicker I could reach my dreams.”
In Toney’s case, a broken leg that forced him into a wheelchair for several months his freshman year and a move from Alabama to North Carolina before his junior year effectively forced him to repeat a grade. Following his junior year at Trinity Christian Academy in Fayetteville, N.C. (Capel’s hometown), Toney’s AAU coach proposed the idea of reclassifying. It wasn’t a move he was totally sold on unless it was the right situation. Three hours into his official visit at Pitt last June, he believed he found just that and committed on the spot.
“I saw that Pitt was a big-time school in the Big East and they were trying to change the program back around in the ACC,” Toney said.
“That impacted me a lot because I wanted to be a part of that. I didn’t want to be at the top school that everybody wants to go to, the big names and stuff like that. I wanted to go to a school where we could actually bring it back up.”
In order to make such a jump, a specific set of academic requirements has to be met. The NCAA mandates that, in order to graduate from high school, an athlete needs 16 core courses to play immediately in college, with 10 of those core courses needing to be completed by the seventh semester of high school. Those athletes must also earn at least a 2.3 GPA in core courses, along with a standardized test score that meets a certain mark.
If that threshold is cleared, an arrangement is created that benefits both players and coaches.
For the former, it’s a chance to accelerate their careers, getting top-end prospects to college quicker and an NBA contract sooner. It also hastens their introduction to college coaching, as well as strength and conditioning programs, and significantly better competition, both in practice and games.
For coaches, it provides yet another wrinkle to an already dizzying recruiting market. Between transfers and early departures to the NBA, coaches can sometimes be left scrambling to fill their rosters at a time when the present crop of high school seniors is largely picked over. In some instances, as it was for Capel, a reeling program with a newly hired coach needs impact players and can therefore make promises other suitors can’t, as it was for McGowens and Toney.
“We needed talent,” Capel said. “Point blank, period. That was it. We needed
talent. We needed some guys we felt like could come in here right away and play.”
Mutually helpful as it is, reclassifying doesn’t come without some complications. Not every recruit has the personality traits, temperament or physical build to enter college basketball a year early, something coaches have to evaluate as they scout a player. Acclimating to college also sometimes comes with acclimating to new roles.
“He’s an 18-year-old,” said Bobby McGowens, Trey’s father. “He’s not a finished product yet. He’s playing off the ball for the first time in four years. It’s an adjustment period for him.”
There’s a more personal aspect to the process, as well. While their successes give them a stage they wouldn’t have come close to having as a high schooler, like when McGowens scored 33 points in a Jan. 9 win against Louisville, their shortcomings are magnified, as well.
What is already a jarring transition — a family sending a child away to college — can be that much more difficult when it’s done a year sooner than anticipated, especially in the case of Toney, who had to be on campus within weeks of committing.
“It was overwhelming at first,” said Tartesha Toney-Teague, Au’Diese’s mother. “For the first week or two, I cried every day. My baby wasn’t home. My mind was set on having one more year. It happened so fast.”
There is, for now, little indication the rise in reclassifications will subside.
Daniels said it seems like an unusually high number of players have opted to do so this year, and there are still a number of recruits originally slated for the 2020 class who are considering moving into 2019 (two of whom, twins Julian and Justin Champagnie, are players Pitt is pursuing).
The Condoleezza Rice-led Commission on College Basketball expressed concern that were the NBA and its players association to lower the draft-eligible age to 18, as the league reportedly proposed in late February, reclassifying will become more widespread, creating “a new generation of 17-year-old, one-and-done players” (coaches have dismissed such fears).
However pervasive reclassifying becomes or remains, the way it exists now could, many years later, be seen as one of several factors that helped a shattered Pitt program back to relevance.
“We got lucky,” Capel said. “We were very fortunate. It has worked out well for us. We think those three guys [freshman Xavier Johnson being the third] have a chance to be a great part of the foundation that we’re building.”