Could one prep school build a competitive Ivy League roster?

Northfield Mount Hermon is a prep school of 630 students. It also happens to be home to a number of future Ivy League athletes. This season 11 former NMH basketball players will be playing on six different Ivy League teams. Only Penn and Princeton won’t be represented. (And the Quakers had one, but Brian Fitzpatrick transferred to Bucknell before last season.)

That group of players includes guys like Harvard’s Laurent Rivard, Dartmouth’s David Rufful and Brown’s Andrew McCarthy. Which begs the question: How competitive would a team composed entirely of NMH alumni be in the Ivy League? Continue reading “Could one prep school build a competitive Ivy League roster?” →

The Ivy League’s wide recruiting world

On one hand Ivy League schools have one of the toughest sells in Division I basketball. The schools commit a lot of money to athletics, but not always to college basketball. There are no scholarships, but there is financial aid. Then there are the academic requirements. You might not have to be Bill Gates to play basketball at Harvard, but you can’t be dumb either. They want you to stay in school for four years.

Thankfully, the Ivy League has a way to combat this problem, by offering some of the best “names” in collegiate education. There are only five Top 20 News and World Reports schools that aren’t in the Ivy League and play Division I basketball. (They are: Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame.) The educational success of the league’s institutions thus gives them national appeal in education, and this year’s recruiting class shows how powerful it is.

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Where are the recruits coming from?

While only nine of the 29 recruits currently committed to New York City mid-majors are playing high school basketball in the state, that number is pretty deceiving about how well schools are mining the talent base of the city. Take a deeper look and see just what some schools are doing to revive and build their programs.

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This is taking things a little too far

Because Rivals.com and other sites provide video of non-scholastic competitions that aren’t open to the public the NCAA has declared that they’re illegal and thus an NCAA institution using them is a secondary violation. This is both hilarious and crazy. You can find out more here, here and here.

Doesn’t the NCAA have something better to do?