The National Case for Beach, Part I
Starting with whether the repeat state champions belong in a truly national field
Back in the day, my staff at ESPN HoopGurlz was put in charge of ranking high-school girls basketball teams. It was called the Fab 50; yes, fifty teams! We took it seriously – so seriously that our internal rule, for both teams and players, is that we wouldn’t rank anybody someone on our staff hadn’t seen with their own two eyes. Most of the time, several us saw several of the candidate teams, often more than once.
That approach ensured context and a consistent perspective.
The approach that was prevalent at the time – and, I assume, mostly persists today – was one person calling a bunch of coaches for input. We thought such methodology introduced motive – ie., the higher my player or recruit is ranked, the better I look – and therefore tainted the process. Moreover, there was never a guarantee that a given coach had actually seen a team (or teams or players) they supposedly were evaluating.
I also was a co-founder and editor-in-chief at Scout.com (now 247) and managed the basketball and football recruiting experts for six years, so am familiar with process of ranking prospects for men’s college sports.
One of the most important variables in putting together rankings is the result of head-to-head matchups. To that end, ESPN HoopGurlz became associated with big national and regional tournaments (ie., “Tournament of Champions”) and urged the best projected teams be invited, then we lobbied those teams to accept the invitations. The result was elite-level competition that had a huge, demonstrable impact on deciding the top teams in the country.
The Throne, which tips off Thursday in New Jersey, has little of the above elements – and the fact that the back-to-back Washington state 3A champion Rainier Beach Vikings were disinvited from the tournament should cast no negative light on the Seattle team or any of its players.
In fact, the Vikings are entitled to breathe a sigh of relief that they did not continue practicing, fly all the way across the country, and play against the level of competition that awaited them. The Throne calls itself a “national championship,” but it falls short of that. Winning such a tournament would have bolstered a Rainier Beach claim to being the best team in the land, but it would not have provided any iron-clad arguments.
I don’t know what criteria The Throne applied to its eight invitees to the boys tournament, but marketing certainly was an important one. It focused a lot of its social-media campaign on Tyran Stokes, the Rainier Beach superstar who also is the consensus No. 1 college recruit in the country. After disinviting the Vikings, The Throne shifted a lot of marketing elbow grease into a “battle for New Jersey,” matching Beach’s replacement, Plainfield, against Bergen Catholic, which would have been the Vikings’ first-round opponent.
Ticket sales matter, I suppose. But, as far as national implications, neither Jersey team is ranked in any of the prominent national polls -- Rivals composite (as of March 9), MaxPreps (March 18), Sports Illustrated (March 18), USA Today (March 15), or ESPN (March 10). Another Throne entrant, Long Island Lutheran (Brookville, N.Y.), is a previous winner of the tournament, but it also is not ranked in the aforementioned polls and, as far as my research could tell, enters the competition with an extremely uninspiring 12-12 record (note: the compilation of game results often are reliant on teams that are less-than-diligent about reporting them).
The Throne field is led by two legit national contenders in Cavalry Christian of Fort Lauderdale, FL, and Sunnyslope of Phoenix, AZ. As reflected in their original seeding at No. 3, the Vikings are, on paper, more highly regarded in national polls than any of the remaining five teams in The Throne tournament. Throne teams that are unranked in two or more polls eliminates all but Wheeler of Marietta, GA.
My examination of the five most prominent national rankings uncovered five teams, plus Rainier Beach, that would supplant Wheeler in a true “national championship” field. I chose the big-brand polls to exclude my own bias from this process, plus gain a diversity of credible opinions. Even polls have points of view; MaxPreps, for example, apparently does not rank sports academies (eg., Prolific Prep and AZ Compass Prep), so I assigned each school’s lowest ranking among the other polls, plus added one, to keep them in an expected range.
Below is a field I’d expect for any tournament marketing itself as a “national championship.” The seedings are based on an average ranking of the five big-brand national polls. For this exercise, I’m not diving into the academy vs. private vs. public school debate; I’m choosing the top eight high-school boys basketball teams for a single-elimination “national championship” tournament. Teams in bold face are in the current The Throne field.
1. St. Paul VI Catholic (Chantily, VA), 33-2
Rivals (1), MaxPreps (1), SI (3), USA Today (1), ESPN (7) = 2.6
2. Prolific Prep (Fort Lauderdale, FL), 36-3
Rivals (9), MaxPreps (10*), SI (2), USA Today (8), ESPN (3) = 4.4 avg
3. Sierra Canyon (Chatsworth, CA), 30-1
Rivals (2), MaxPreps (3), SI (5), USA Today (3), ESPN (11) = 5.0 avg
4. Calvary Christian Academy (Fort Lauderdale, FL), 24-1
Rivals (3), MaxPreps (2), SI (7), USA Today (2), ESPN (12) = 5.2 avg
5. AZ Compass Prep (Chandler, AZ), 18-5
Rivals (10), MaxPreps (11*), SI (6), USA Today (5), ESPN (1) = 6.6 avg
6. Sunnyslope (Phoenix, AZ), 28-2
Rivals (5), MaxPreps (5), SI (16), USA Today (6), ESPN (21) = 10.6 avg
7. Montverde Academy (Montverde, FL), 21-6
Rivals (13), MaxPreps (23), SI (11), USA Today (22), ESPN (2) = 14.2 avg
8. Rainier Beach (Seattle, WA ), 29-1
Rivals (7), MaxPreps (12), SI (12), USA Today (16), ESPN (25) = 14.4 avg
Alternate:
Wheeler (Marietta, Ga.), 27-6
Rivals (23), MaxPreps (10), SI (21), USA Today (25), ESPN (23) = 20.4 avg
Would they all come, if you simply invited them? Not necessarily. However, programs this high-achieving likely would want to compete against other high-achieving programs and get their just due. As I implied at the beginning of the piece, it would require some work.
If you bill yourself as a “national championship,” you obligate yourself to doing the work, especially if you are backed, as The Throne is, by the union representing NBA players and a national marketing and event production firm.
PART II: I will use video research, personnel assessment, and what I’ve ascertained from a season of covering the Rainier Beach High School boys basketball team.
Part II: In-State Rivals Wrong for Battering Stokes and his team’s rep