billo
Years ago

US High School Ball and LeBron

I watched More Than A Game last night, the documentary following LeBron and his St. Vincent-St. Mary team mates through their storied high school careers - really excellent doco, a must for any basketball fan.

Anyway, the film starts with St. Vincent-St. Mary about to play in the national division II championship game with LeBron as a senior. The rest of the movie gives the impression that they were the best high school team in the country (ranked number 1 on same list as schools such as Oak Hill Academy) so I couldn't figure out why they were in division II and whether that meant there was a bunch of division 1 teams that were better than them.

Does anyone have any knowledge about how US High School hoops works and how the divisions apply? It appears schools are given their divisional allocations based on number of enrollments but do the national ranking include all divisions? Was SVSM really the best school in the country or just the best div 2 school?

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ball  
Years ago

Where did you watch it? internet?
High schools that are ranked in either Div 1 or Div 2 are based on school enrolements. not how good their sporting teams are.
You could have the best basketball team in the country but have only 400 students go to your high school, which would mean a div 2 or 3 ranking.

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chazz michael michaels  
Years ago

love the line "they had the best players from all over the country, we had the best players from our hood"

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Bully  
Years ago

The DVD came out on thursday, very good viewing, definately a must for all bball fans

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Peter Maravich  
Years ago

i don't know how the system over there works, but back in late 02, my high school team played a curtain raiser to LeBron's team.

I recall they were on a tour called "The fantastic Scholastic tour" or something similar. They played Reyonlds (i think??) a team from North Carolina that was ranked 7th or 8th in the US. It was a trouncing.
The game was played out of Greensboro collusiem (sp?) and at the time the game broke the record for the most attendees at a high school game.

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billo  
Years ago

Thanks Pete, cool story!

According to wikipedia there is no national tournament for high school which sort of disagrees with what happened in the movie (although that was 7 years ago).

The conclusion I've come up with on how it probably works is that they have state championships based on divisions but in addition to that schools also get national rankings of they're good enough. These 20 or 30 schools that make the rankings can be in any division (Oak Hill Academy has under 200 pupils so couldn't be a division 1 school) travel to compete against other schools who also specialise in basketball. There's no formal "championship" or rigid schedule or leaderboard but there is a ranking system that's governed by some sort of body who rank teams based on who they've beaten and lost to (like the college rankings).

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Anonymous  
Years ago

i am from the states and there isn't a national high school tournament... Akron st. v's was playing in their state tournament in that documentary for the state of Ohio... was at the game... teams get ranked nationally by USA Today newspaper based on their number of nationally ranked players... obviously when u have a LeBron James on your team you will be highly ranked

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Anonymous  
Years ago

oh and the division thing is done by number of students true... in ohio you can be D1 all the way down to D4... akron st v's didn't make the jump to D2 till lebron's junior year of high school.. before that they were D3 and beating all teams by 60 points... enrollment in the school went up while he was there for obvious reasons

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Jeffrey Revell Reade  
Years ago

US High School and College Basketball is of very high standard. I actually enjoy watching college basketball over watching the NBA because there is no money involved and it comes down to purely the basketball.

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