Almadenmike
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I Root For: Rice Owls
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RE: ESPNU @ 2pm Rice BB Recruit Playing
(01-19-2015 04:55 PM)ExcitedOwl18 Wrote: (01-19-2015 04:36 PM)WRCisforgotten79 Wrote: You mean to say that this "super" recruit doesn't even start for his high school team?
Montverde is not a "high school" team... Last year, they had seniors go on to play at LSU, VT, Harvard, Cal, Southern Illinois, and Xavier. That is in addition to the LSU commit who I think is one of the top players in the nation, and Marquez of course.
A private school (grades 3-12) near Orlando, Florida, Montverde Academy (say: mawnt-vaird) is as old as Rice, having opened Sept. 23, 1912 “in a two-room wooden building and a church, with two teachers and limited resources.” It currently has ~900 students. Yearly tuition (including room & board) is $45,845 (domestic students) and $47.745 for international students, who make up 37- 65 percent of the student body, depending on the information source.
It has a long athletic history, but in the last 15 years, it has made a big push to be known as a basketball power.
Here are some informative excerpts from a 2012 article in Orlando Magazine:
Peter Karasotis Wrote:The not-for-profit private school in Lake County ... wants to be the best in all its various sports and academic disciplines. But make no mistake, basketball is the engine pulling this train. For evidence, consider that while Montverde Academy recently completed a $1.5 million fine arts center, replete with state-of-the-art technology and an Apple lab with 24 new iMac computers, it broke ground in February on a $6.5 million athletic center, the centerpiece of which will be a gym primarily for its basketball program. And unlike sports teams at public schools, which travel in old-school yellow buses or large passenger vans, Montverde’s basketball players travel to games in a plush coach bus that the academy owns.
“Our interest in basketball is great, and I don’t apologize for that,” (Montverde Academy’s headmaster, Kasey) Kesselring says. “While I don’t want basketball to define us, there’s no question that I consider our athletic programs to be an extension of our marketing program. Sports brings an awareness to our school in ways that a debate team or a science program or a math team don’t. That’s just our society. We’re sports crazy. We recognize that here, and we recognize that for us basketball is our biggest sport.”
“There’s no question that our athletic program is an extension of our marketing program,” he says. “It absolutely brings awareness to our school. It’s why I schedule our open house, which is our admissions enrollment drive, on the same day of the MAIT championship game. The basketball game that night brings with it a lot of energy, a real buzz to our campus, and we capitalize on that.”
. . .
Montverde basketball is premier and pressure-packed. And the school’s aspirations to produce the best high school basketball teams in the nation are probably why, in March 2011, Kesselring called in the Eagles’ then-head coach, Kevin Sutton, and, according to Sutton, told him the basketball program would be moving on without him. It was stunning news in the prep basketball world, because it was Sutton who built Montverde Academy into a perennial national power. But that wasn’t all. Just a few months later came another thunderclap announcement: Montverde Academy would replace Sutton with Kevin Boyle, whom Kesselring lured from another national power, St. Patrick High School in Elizabeth, N.J.
. . .
Hired in 2003 by Kesselring, Sutton built Montverde’s basketball program from the hardwood floor up. In fact, the season before he arrived the Eagles went winless.
“No one in the basketball world knew of Montverde before Coach Sutton got there,” says Rick Staudt, a prep scout, evaluator and writer for SourceHoops.com, and the Florida editor for HoopScoopOnline.com. ...
In Sutton’s eight years as head coach, he produced a 186-33 record, elevating the school to national prominence. In his last season at Montverde, Sutton compiled a 22-4 record that saw the Eagles finish ranked 15th nationally. In 2007, HoopsUSA.com declared the Eagles its national champions, and in 2010 they were the runner-up in the ESPN RISE National High School Invitational tournament, which most in the prep basketball world consider the truest measuring stick for a mythical national championship. Sixty of Sutton’s players went on to play college basketball, many of them at prestigious athletic programs and many others at prestigious academic programs. Two of Sutton’s former players ... currently play in the NBA—Luc Richard Mbah a Moute with the Milwaukee Bucks and Solomon Alabi with the Toronto Raptors.
Two months after he and Montverde parted ways, Sutton got an assistant coaching job at George Washington University. ...
Staudt speculates that Montverde changed coaches because “in spite of all the success Coach Sutton had there ... the administration felt that for whatever reason the program had plateaued and they needed something else—a fresh change or a new perspective or a new voice.”
...
“When the basketball team started getting national attention, we started hearing from alumni that we hadn’t heard from before. Maybe they saw our name in a newspaper article, or in a magazine. Whatever it was, it raised our awareness.”
With that awareness, though, comes scrutiny. Though Montverde Academy’s basketball program is registered with the Florida High School Athletic Association, it chooses not to compete in the FHSAA’s state tournament because it doesn’t want to continually answer questions about recruiting players, which member schools are banned from doing. Last decade, the FHSAA fined and sanctioned Montverde’s baseball team for alleged recruiting.
“I recognize that I have the ability to attract students from a wider audience than my counterparts in the public school system,” Kesselring says. “So that word ‘recruit,’ we have to quit using that as if it’s a bad word. I have to recruit students here. If a private school doesn’t recruit students, then our doors are closed. I have the welfare of 150 employees and their families to consider. So I have to recruit, and I don’t apologize for that. That’s why I have a great soccer coach, and we won the boys national championship last year. It’s also why I bring in the best band instructor that I can. I bring in the best academic team that I can. The difference is, there isn’t a governing body over our math team, which wins awards every year, ready to launch an investigation.
“Yes, I’m trying to have the best basketball team. Should I apologize for that? I don’t. I don’t apologize for trying to be the best.”
At the same time, there are also no apologies from players and their families. Patricio Garino, the 6-foot-6 senior guard from Argentina, first heard of Montverde Academy when he met Sutton at a tournament in South America. Intrigued, he looked into the school, liked what he learned about it, and decided to come to America. “This school is amazing,” he says. “I love it. I’m getting to play with and against the greatest players in the world. It’s the best that you can get. On and off the court, it’s been amazing.”
...
It wasn’t always that way at Montverde Academy. The school was gradually declining in enrollment when Kesselring arrived in 1999. If the academy was gaining in anything, it was a reputation for where parents dumped problem teenagers in a last-ditch effort to straighten them out, almost as a form of punishment. Back then, Montverde Academy was only grades 7 through 12, with smoking allowed on campus if a student had parental permission. “That was one of the first things I convinced the board of trustees to get rid of,” Kesselring says.
A lot of problem students were jettisoned during the early years of Kesselring’s regime, and eventually basketball became a focus. That’s when things took off.
(This post was last modified: 01-19-2015 06:12 PM by Almadenmike.)
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