From the Kennebec Journal Website
PITTSFIELD -- Nick Combs has to get up in 12 hours, three hours before sunrise, and slide his sleepy self into the passenger seat of coach Dave Campbell's car. Campbell will drive Combs from the Maine Central Institute campus in Pittsfield to the bus station in Augusta, where he'll catch a ride to Boston's Logan International Airport.
From there, Combs will fly to his home in Oklahoma City for a quick holiday break.
But right now, Combs is just over center court, playing defense against Lee Academy's Breen Weeks. Right now Combs is jumping, deflecting a pass to his teammate Derek Libbey. Right now Combs is sprinting towards his own basket, catching Libbey's long pass for an easy layup, the first points of the game.
Right now is why Combs is thousands of miles from home.
"This is a place that will help me go further," Combs said at dinner shortly after his Huskies beat Lee 72-62 in the last game before winter break. "This is definitely a place I can compete."
For years, Maine Central Institute has been a haven for basketball players looking for a place to raise their grades, play a higher level of basketball and catch the eye of a college coach. Since 1989, more than 100 MCI players have played Division I basketball, and nine former Huskies played in the NBA.
Former coach Max Good built a juggernaut in the 1990s, winning 90 percent of his games in his 10 years at the Pittsfield school. In recent years, MCI hasn't fallen on hard time by any stretch, but now, at the halfway point of the 10th season since Good left to become an assistant coach at UNLV, the Huskies have come back to the prep school pack.
"It's changed drastically (in the last decade)," Campbell said.
"I wouldn't say there is a great deal of wistful reminiscing, but there is pride in the tradition," MCI Headmaster Christopher Hopkins said.
Campbell, now in his third season at MCI, hopes to make the school one of the top prep basketball programs in the nation once again. While that goal is achievable, the days of undefeated season and 79-game win streaks are likely over, not just at MCI, but in prep basketball in general.
A number of factors have contributed to the changes at MCI, including:
• Stability at the top. Campbell is the third coach of the Huskies since Good left following the 1998-99 season. Karl Henrikson, Good's successor, stayed three seasons. Ed Jones, a former University of Maine player and assistant coach, lasted four years.
The turnover on the bench has led many of the top players to look at other schools. For example, Jason Smith has been coach at Brewster Academy in New Hampshire for nine years. Brewster is ranked 10th in the nation in the latest GameWornUniforms.com National Boy's Prep School Basketball Poll.
"Our school has lacked the consistency of some of the other schools," Campbell said.
Campbell came to MCI from Barton Community College in Great Bend, Kan., where he served as the men's basketball coach from 2003-05. Prior to that, Campbell was the Director of Basketball Operations at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Neb. He also spent 13 seasons as the coach at Western Nebraska Community College in Scottsbluff, Neb.
Campbell has a big supporter in Hopkins.
"Everything is so dependent on the person running it. David Campbell has put into place what my vision of the program is," Hopkins said. "He's a father figure, a tutor, a confidant. Whether they've won by 20 or lost by 20, he's proud of them."
It's not just the turnover on the bench at MCI. Hopkins, who took over as headmaster of MCI in July, is the third headmaster the school has had since 2004. Athletic director Earl Anderson is in his first year on the job.
Campbell feels that stability coming back.
"I work for a good group of people," he said.
Hopkins pointed to the academic achievement of the prep basketball players. Six players -- Tobi Erhardt, Mitch Rolls, Libbey, Joshua Hale, Jamael Babineau and Lee Suvlu -- earned high honors for the first quarter of this year.
• Competition. There are more prep school options than ever, and that means the talent pool is thin. The chance of getting a DerMarr Johnson and a Caron Butler on the same team, like MCI had in 1998-99, is rare.
"There's going to be fewer teams that have three or four of those absolute top players," Hopkins said. "Kids have so many options now."
In the last decade, prep teams have popped up around the country. Here in Maine, Lee Academy added a postgraduate team a few years ago. Notre Dame Prep of Fitchburg, Mass., and the South Kent School of Conn., also joined the prep basketball fray.
"I'd venture to say there are three times as many programs as when Max was here," Campbell said. "The Job Corps in New Jersey started a school."
MCI not only has to compete with more legitimate programs, like Lee, for players, it has to compete with programs that are schools in name only. Storefronts, or diploma factories that offer little in the way of academic standards and don't prepare athletes to succeed academically in college.
Last year, the NCAA announced it would no longer accept transcripts from Lutheran Christian Academy in Philadelphia or Prince Avenue Prep in Pickens, S.C. Other schools have also come under fire from the NCAA for lax academic credentials.
"A lot of them really hurt the prep school image," Campbell said. "A lot of kids now, they think (prep school) is the only way to go."
Some of the schools MCI competes against offer basketball scholarships, while at MCI, financial aid is need-based. Finley Prep of Las Vegas doesn't have a postgraduate program, but the school has a full slate of players on scholarship.
According to the school's Web site, tuition at MCI for the 2008-09 academic year is $35,500. In 2000, the cost of a year at MCI was $23,000.
Even Good, now an assistant coach at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles after serving as head coach at Bryant College, sees the explosion of prep basketball programs.
"There's prep schools out here now. Finley Prep is legitimate, but some of them are storefronts," Good said. "The NCAA is cracking down on them. Certainly, MCI is not one of those."
While the MCI schedule is full of talented prep teams, the small college programs in Maine that used to take on the Huskies have vanished from the schedule.
"You look at the teams they played back then. I don't know who half of them are," Campbell said. "None of the JV teams in the state will play us. None of the junior colleges, they won't play us. I don't know why."
• Scrutiny. In the spring of 2000, the NCAA suspended seven college players, including MCI graduates Johnson, Erick Barkley and Andre Williams, after it learned a portion of their tuition to MCI was paid by their AAU basketball programs and sponsors.
"I know of how many kids who come here that the situation that they're in, whether it's their school situation, whether it's their community, whether it's the parental situation they're in, is not good. And if anybody can help them get out of that situation, I think that's the right thing to do," MCI's then-athletic director Julie Treadwell said to ESPN at the time.
After years of national attention for the program's successes, MCI was under the public microscope of an NCAA investigation. Campbell, who was the subject of an investigation while at Barton Community College, said he feels the school may have scaled back the prep basketball program after the incident.
Campbell pled guilty to a count of aiding and abetting misapplication of funds from a student assistance program in February 2006.
MCI hired Campbell, who paid $7,714 in restitution, after its investigation ruled that he was a victim of circumstance rather than intentional wrongdoing, former headmaster Joanne Szadkowski said when Campbell arrived on campus.
Hopkins, who has been on the job at MCI for approximately six months, declined to comment on the program's past, but reiterated he feels Campbell is the right man to move the Huskies forward.
"It's what you don't see that remarkable about him. From the moment the postgrad players hear about our school ... he's telling them what they can expect, and more importantly, he's telling them what's expected of them," Hopkins said.
Campbell looks at this year's roster and sees a handful of players who will likely play in Division I. Guard Mitch Rolls of Coffeyville, Kan., has already verbally committed to Colgate, and Combs is considering Rice, Lamar, Texas-El Paso, and the University of New Hampshire. Martino Brock also could hear from some Division I programs.
To their credit, the MCI players don't look at all the banners in the gymnasium and feel pressure. They don't see ghosts when they hear names like Caron Butler, DerMarr Johnson and Sam Cassell, some of the MCI alumni who went on to NBA success.
"It gives me a good sense of pride," Rolls said. "You want to represent the school well, like everybody else did."
"It's exciting," Combs added. "It's an opportunity."
Right now, that all Combs and his teammates want. An opportunity is what MCI has always offered, and with all the changes in the prep basketball world, that will remain constant.
No comments:
Post a Comment