Post by less1brain on Sept 27, 2021 7:56:47 GMT -8
This is all second-hand information, but I saw and heard some interesting stuff at the Pangos FR-SO Showcase over the weekend.
I'll do a more expanded report later on, but one of the top 5 players at the camp was Elzie Harrington, 6-4 FR PG Bellflower St. John Bosco. He's very tall and long for a PG, pretty athletic with a superb long J, terrific body control and all of the passing and ball handling talent you'd want in a very high end PG.
He can coast at times, a complaint one can level at a lot of young players who have a lot of talent.
It would be easy to compare him to a player like D'Aaron Fox if he gets a little bit more explosive and I can see that happening with age and body development. His freshman year of high school has jut started.
As luck would have it, his father is a professor at UCLA Medical School who graduated from UCLA and got his medical degree from Harvard.
Can you beat that? Mick Cronin couldn't ask for a better shot out of the starting gate.
The son is a 4.0 student already enrolled in AP classes. The family rule is: Get less than an "A" and you don't play or so I was told.
Cronin will really have to bollix this to miss out on Elzie Harrington.
Chris "Pop" Popoola, who gets pretty good info on players (seriously, he goes right up to them and their parents and asks all sorts of very direct questions), thinks Harrington will go to UCLA if he goes to college (so say all of the family acquaintances he's spoken with and some some of them are UCLA alums) and Pop agreed with me that any idea that Harrington will turn pro straight out of high school is just pure speculation (though if he has a chance to be a first round pick out of high school, I assume he will go pro; why wait if you're that good?).
Pop said neither father nor son talk about colleges with any specificity and emphasize that it's still early days and the young man wants to focus on school and his high school team. No contact can take place until the end of his FR season barring a pre-existing relationship.
Dinos Trigonis also thinks UCLA is the landing spot barring some major doo doo by Cronin.
Not that Cronin should feel any pressure here.
One of the other top 5 players will also be a FR at St. John Bosco, 6-7 Kade Bonham. He might weigh 240, but he can hit 3s and grab the defensive rebound at one end and take it coast to coast to finish or drop dimes. He made like a 14-year old version of Julius Randle, but he already has the J. He was a monster on the offensive glass even when playing against some High D 1 6-9 240-type guys. 24 rebounds in one game, 22 in another.
Both Harrington and Bonham are 14 year olds. There were some 16 year old FR at this showcase along with at least one 18-year old SO.
With 6-9 SR Jeremiah Nyarko and 6-7 SR Christian Estrada both returning, St. John Bosco has to be ranked in the top 5 in the state. Relying on two FR to play key roles will be tough, but the Braves have some quick SR and JR guards who got PT last year off the bench and the FR don't have to be the stars.
A lot of college coaches are stuffing their rosters with transfers and recruiting of high school players has definitely cooled off unless we're talking about guys ranked in the top 100, but I think that will work its way out over the course of this season. My best guess is that Nyarko will wind up signing with a Pac-12 school and Estrada ought to get signed, but will likely end up at the mid D 1 level before he eventually transfers to the High D 1 level as an upperclassman.
So this will be a very talented and unselfish team. Last year, Lamaj Lewis (LMU) and Scotty Washington (Mississippi State) tended to dominate the ball and if they got cold, they wouldn't give it up to Nyarko who at 6-9 is a better 3-point shooter than them and has the size and athleticism to score around the basket.
I'll do a more expanded report later on, but one of the top 5 players at the camp was Elzie Harrington, 6-4 FR PG Bellflower St. John Bosco. He's very tall and long for a PG, pretty athletic with a superb long J, terrific body control and all of the passing and ball handling talent you'd want in a very high end PG.
He can coast at times, a complaint one can level at a lot of young players who have a lot of talent.
It would be easy to compare him to a player like D'Aaron Fox if he gets a little bit more explosive and I can see that happening with age and body development. His freshman year of high school has jut started.
As luck would have it, his father is a professor at UCLA Medical School who graduated from UCLA and got his medical degree from Harvard.
Can you beat that? Mick Cronin couldn't ask for a better shot out of the starting gate.
The son is a 4.0 student already enrolled in AP classes. The family rule is: Get less than an "A" and you don't play or so I was told.
Cronin will really have to bollix this to miss out on Elzie Harrington.
Chris "Pop" Popoola, who gets pretty good info on players (seriously, he goes right up to them and their parents and asks all sorts of very direct questions), thinks Harrington will go to UCLA if he goes to college (so say all of the family acquaintances he's spoken with and some some of them are UCLA alums) and Pop agreed with me that any idea that Harrington will turn pro straight out of high school is just pure speculation (though if he has a chance to be a first round pick out of high school, I assume he will go pro; why wait if you're that good?).
Pop said neither father nor son talk about colleges with any specificity and emphasize that it's still early days and the young man wants to focus on school and his high school team. No contact can take place until the end of his FR season barring a pre-existing relationship.
Dinos Trigonis also thinks UCLA is the landing spot barring some major doo doo by Cronin.
Not that Cronin should feel any pressure here.
One of the other top 5 players will also be a FR at St. John Bosco, 6-7 Kade Bonham. He might weigh 240, but he can hit 3s and grab the defensive rebound at one end and take it coast to coast to finish or drop dimes. He made like a 14-year old version of Julius Randle, but he already has the J. He was a monster on the offensive glass even when playing against some High D 1 6-9 240-type guys. 24 rebounds in one game, 22 in another.
Both Harrington and Bonham are 14 year olds. There were some 16 year old FR at this showcase along with at least one 18-year old SO.
With 6-9 SR Jeremiah Nyarko and 6-7 SR Christian Estrada both returning, St. John Bosco has to be ranked in the top 5 in the state. Relying on two FR to play key roles will be tough, but the Braves have some quick SR and JR guards who got PT last year off the bench and the FR don't have to be the stars.
A lot of college coaches are stuffing their rosters with transfers and recruiting of high school players has definitely cooled off unless we're talking about guys ranked in the top 100, but I think that will work its way out over the course of this season. My best guess is that Nyarko will wind up signing with a Pac-12 school and Estrada ought to get signed, but will likely end up at the mid D 1 level before he eventually transfers to the High D 1 level as an upperclassman.
So this will be a very talented and unselfish team. Last year, Lamaj Lewis (LMU) and Scotty Washington (Mississippi State) tended to dominate the ball and if they got cold, they wouldn't give it up to Nyarko who at 6-9 is a better 3-point shooter than them and has the size and athleticism to score around the basket.
). Elzie Harrington is 6th in 2025 (no Kade Bonham at all).