Inside the institutions of higher basketball learning where kids like Jalen Poyser learn to be pros

By Gare Joyce, In las Vegas, Nev., and Orangeville, Ont. | Photography by Philip Cheung

Down three with three seconds to go, Findlay Prep’s hopes of its fourth national high school title in five years were riding on one last shot, and all Jalen Poyser could do was watch from the bench. He wanted to be on the floor, wanted to have the ball in his hands with the Pilots’ perfect season on the line, wanted to be able to go back to Henderson, Nev., as the hero. This, however, wasn’t his time. Poyser watched the ball come around to Nigel Williams-Goss, a McDonald’s All American point guard, ranked in the top 10 of NCAA-bound ballers in the graduating class of 2013. Williams-Goss had rallied the team from an 11-point second-half deficit to St. Benedict’s of New Jersey, so it was only fair that he was the one to hoist a jumper from three-point range. Poyser held his breath. So did the fans, NCAA coaches and recruiters in the Georgetown Prep gym in Bethesda, Md. So did everyone watching the broadcast of this semifinal at the ESPN National High School Invitational tournament last April.

The ball rimmed out. St. Benedict’s controlled the rebound at the buzzer. ESPN’s cameras raced over to the leading scorer for St. Benedict’s, Tyler Ennis, a guard bound for Syracuse, a kid Poyser knew from playgrounds and gyms in Toronto. The Pilots gathered at their bench, grabbed their warm-ups and headed off to the dressing room, trying in vain to find consolation in their 35-1 season.
Like his teammates, Poyser was disappointed, but he was the lone sophomore among them. He heaved a sigh not as deep as those of the nine seniors who had just played their last high school game. Even in tough times, he projects cool. Poyser’s takeaway after the loss to St. Benedict’s: As a junior and a senior, he’d be the All-American in the starting lineup, getting the big minutes, winding up with the ball in his hands with the game on the line. He represented the future at Findlay Prep. He thought so. Everyone did. He was already looking ahead to meeting the new recruits who’d land on campus and head to the gym in six months’ time.

As it turns out, a lot can happen in the life of a 16-year-old hoop star in a lot less time than that.

When you’re No. 1, they’re always looking to take you down. Thus do the Findlay Prep Pilots find themselves in the unfortunate position of being the top-ranked target for criticism of U.S. high school sports. It cuts through the usual knocks about breeding a star culture and creating a sense of entitlement. No, with Findlay it goes right to legitimacy. A headline on Deadspin crystallizes the point: “High School Basketball without High School.” The New York Daily News spells it out: “Findlay Prep is not a traditional high school, but a basketball team that consists of just 12 players who live together in a private residence and barnstorm the country, playing a national schedule.”

Haters are only going to bother to hate if you’re good, and Findlay Prep is that good. There’s the three U.S. high school titles in five years, the 54-game winning streak before St. Benedict’s upset the Pilots. Even more impressive is Findlay’s record of turning out NBA players. Only a few NCAA powerhouse programs could match the high school’s list of alumni the past few seasons. Avery Bradley was the first Findlay alum to become a first-round draft choice when Boston yanked him out of Texas in 2010. Since then, three other former Pilots have been first-rounders, all hailing from Toronto: Tristan Thompson (fourth to Cleveland in 2011), Cory Joseph (29th to San Antonio in 2011) and Anthony Bennett (first overall to Cleveland this past June).

“I couldn’t have got as far as I did as fast as I did without Findlay, and that’s true for all of us,” Thompson says. “Maybe people don’t know Findlay but it’s pretty much like other private schools. The school work is the same, lots of personal attention. The time on the court, though, is intense.”

Thompson’s testimonial won’t quiet Findlay Prep’s critics, middle-aged moralists whose vision of high school sports is something out of Hoosiers. Their thinking: No one wins that much on the square and, more to the point, a prep school attracting that much talent has to be doing something crooked. They connect dots: Findlay Prep must be like those old University of Nevada–Las Vegas teams that rolled over opponents and ran roughshod over the rule book. Yeah, Findlay Prep as the Runnin’ Rebels writ small.

Of course, Findlay Prep isn’t quite singled out for suspicion. Other institutions of higher basketball learning have been subject to tsk-tsking, including Virginia’s Oak Hill Academy, Maryland’s Montrose Christian School and Huntington Prep, the West Virginia program that last year featured Andrew Wiggins, the Toronto-born phenom who is projected as the first overall pick of the 2014 NBA draft. In fact, Huntington Prep’s legitimacy was seemingly questioned by ESPN when the network chose not to invite the school to its tournament last spring even though Wiggins’s star power could have sent ratings soaring.

Memo to the haters: Findlay and Huntington are the future of high school sports. Save the sermons. If only there were enough preps to accommodate all the players who could benefit from them. Someday there will be. They’re springing up across the States and even in Canada. And while these aren’t schools in a traditional sense, the players are student athletes in every sense. Don’t mistake the unconventional for the unethical. Don’t presume that those enrolled are callow youths there for the exploiting. They are, more than anyone else, protective of their own best interests. Witness Jalen Poyser.

Back in the fall of 2012, Poyser was your average Grade 10 student at Father Henry Carr Catholic Secondary School in Etobicoke, Ont., but above average in every way on the basketball court. A six-foot-four point guard, Poyser had led his Brampton Warriors rep-league team to two provincial championships. He had played on Ontario teams that won Canadian titles. He had played in the U.S. and in international tournaments. He was looking at landing an NCAA Division I ride when he graduated. Poyser liked Henry Carr as a school, liked the coaches there. He couldn’t help it if Toronto’s high school ball looked, well, small.

A bit more than a month into the school year, a kid left Findlay Prep, opening up a spot on the roster. A call was placed to Mark Poyser about the possibility of his son transferring. “We don’t recruit underclassmen generally,” said Todd Simon, who had been appointed as head coach of the Pilots in the summer of 2012 after previously serving as an assistant for several seasons. “A sophomore is a pretty rare thing for us, but Jalen was obviously a real talent. We thought he’d be a good fit and it would be a great experience for him.”

Mark Poyser, a grade-school teacher, knew about Findlay. A former guard at Simon Fraser, he had coached Bennett and Thompson with the Nike-sponsored CIA Bounce program in Brampton, Ont. He had coached other players who had gone to prep schools and landed NCAA scholarships. He had a good idea about the opportunity that Findlay presented. It was done pretty quickly. Jalen had a scholarship to Findlay. Hard to put a dollar value on it but a conservative estimate would be $40,000.

Jalen Poyser needs just one word to describe his impression of Findlay Prep when he first arrived: “Weird.” That’s the impression most come away with, player or just passerby.
The physical optics are not so out of the ordinary: a few sandstone school buildings behind high fences, pristine grounds lined by palm trees and an artificial turf football field without so much as a scuff mark. But go to the front gate in the morning and you’ll see Escalade after Benz after Beamer dropping off grade-schoolers no older than 13, decked out in school uniforms. They are the students of the Henderson International School, where tuition can run up to $18,000 a year. If you see a thick-chested guy with a well-tattooed face dropping his kids off, that would be Mike Tyson.

If you see a guy who’s six-foot-ten and talking a blue streak while dropping off his brood, that would be former NBA journeyman Jerome Williams.

Only when a van arrives carrying the boys from Findlay Prep will you see a high school kid. And unless you sit in on a class with the ballplayers, you won’t see any other high-schoolers throughout the day. No crowded lunchroom. Nobody sitting on a lawn with a lunch his mom packed. No football team on the field. No pep rallies. No cheerleaders.

This, of course, begs an explanation. It begins with a patron of the hardwood arts: Cliff Findlay, a press-shy billionaire car dealer and former varsity player at UNLV, who envisioned an eponymous prep-hoops program eight years ago. He had a name, the Pilots, that would honour the memory of his late father, an aviator; a dorm that the program’s website once described as a “near-million-dollar home” with “two big-screen [televisions], all new furniture, custom extra-long beds … wireless Internet, full cable TV [and] two refrigerators kept full”; and a sponsor in Nike that would provide kicks and a fine line of hoop couture. Findlay, who declined Sportsnet’s interview requests, reached out to Henderson International, a college-preparatory school with classes running from pre-kindergarten through Grade 12. In the beginning, Findlay Prep’s players blended in with the rest of the school’s juniors and seniors, but that lasted only a couple of years. When the recession hit the Las Vegas economy with Stage 5 force in 2009, enrolment declined and Henderson International had to scrap its upper grades and offer schooling only up to Grade 8. Findlay arranged for the players to continue their studies in an otherwise vacant building. Since then, teachers have been retained along with administrators to oversee a class comprised of 12.

The idea of Findlay Prep being “High School Basketball without High School” isn’t operative. It is, in fact, “High School Basketball without Other High School Students.”

When Poyser arrived in October 2012, he felt like an outsider more than a newcomer. The roster had been set. The Pilots had sat for their team picture. The players’ headshots were up on the website, their bios written for the media guide. The coaching staff had put in long work with the players on conditioning: runs up the hills overlooking the campus, defensive slides that would go the length of the football field at a shot. Poyser staggered away from the first workouts and practices—his first against older players, all bound for NCAA Division I—dead tired. “Jalen was in a tough position,” Simon said. “He had been brought in cold, weeks after the others. He had to learn on the fly.”

Poyser had been out in front of every team he had ever played for. Now, he wasn’t a starter, or first off the bench or even third or fourth. He didn’t see any action except the warm-ups in the first games on Findlay Prep’s schedule. Even in practice, he spent time as a spectator: In five-on-fives, running offensive sets, he watched until he was subbed in with the second string. There were only 11 other students at Findlay Prep but to Poyser’s mind that was three or four too many. Poyser seems impassive at his most emotive, taking everything in, deep in thought, but his poker-table mien cracks and his voice rises in anger with just the memory of waiting on the sidelines. “I had heard that I wasn’t going to get as many minutes as I usually did,” he says. “But I like to compete. I don’t like to sit on the bench. I wanted to kill.”

Mark Poyser wondered if the situation was too broken to fix. “It seemed like things were going to go off the rails,” he says. “I thought that Jalen might want to come home. He was mad that he was on the bench. I told him, ‘Practice has to be your playground.’”

The son took his father’s words to heart and thereafter the rest of the Pilots were the worse for Poyser’s frustrations. He mined that urge to kill and found a new level of intensity. His reports back to his father had a change in tone, at once excited and anxious. “I’m wrecking shop in practice,” he said. “But these guys are trippin’.” That is, his teammates weren’t particularly enthused with the new kid’s fire. On Mark’s advice, Poyser went to Simon and let him know that he wasn’t trying to show up anybody, that he was only trying to earn minutes. When Simon spoke to the team, he put tensions to bed. He also ended up putting Poyser in the starting lineup for 10 straight games in the middle of the season, ahead of players with D-I rides in hand. The start of a beautiful friendship, Poyser thought.

The demands of playing against the top programs in the U.S., almost always as villainous visitors, didn’t wear on the 15-year-old. Poyser was thriving. “I was improving, every aspect of my game,” he says. He was looking forward to being “a marquee player at Findlay, someone a kid could look up to, a role model.”

The season-ending loss to St. Benedict’s was a disappointment for Poyser, but he was able to take solace in letters and calls from NCAA Division I schools, including some in the powerhouse conferences, the ACC and the Big Ten. The move to Findlay Prep was paying off even better than planned and the decision to go back to Nevada in the fall seemed like an easy one. Everything on the court was coming together, Poyser thought. As it turned out, however, everything off the court was coming apart.

It had started midway through the school year, a small detail that someone other than a teacher might have missed: Whenever Mark Poyser called, his son told him that he had finished his homework. Back at Father Henry Carr, Poyser would inevitably ask for his father’s help with assignments and somehow it seemed like there was never enough time to get everything done. “Jalen’s a good student, loves math especially,” Mark says. “He wants to do engineering in university. That’s something that he asks when he hears from schools—do they have engineering programs?”

Findlay Prep claims to have an impeccable academic record: 100 percent graduation rate, each and every one of the players owning grades and SAT scores that let them step right into an NCAA Division I program. The prep has done a fair share of good work on behalf of players who might not have graduated otherwise. That, however, wasn’t the case with Poyser, and the way things were playing out in the classroom, he and his family had a sense that one door might be opening wider, but another was closing. That Poyser wasn’t being equipped with the tools he’d need in engineering school.

It was an issue, maybe one that could have been worked out before the start of classes that fall, with an enriched program, some tutoring above and beyond. That possibility wouldn’t be investigated, however. It would never get that far. The ground was shifting at Findlay Prep.

In June, UNLV offered Todd Simon a job as an assistant coach. It was too good to pass up. “That hurt,” Poyser says. “I got along with coach Simon. He was one of best coaches I ever had.”
Coming in the middle of a recruiting period, Simon’s departure left Cliff Findlay in a jam: He needed to replace the exiting coach with someone who was familiar with the returning players as well as the program. To find his man, Findlay needed only to look across the grounds where parents were dropping off their kids.

Jerome Williams’s involvement with Findlay Prep’s program started when he and some friends, pros and former collegians, jumped into a pick-up game with a bunch of the Pilots back in 2009. “I thought I was just going to get a run in,” says the 40-year-old Williams, who was with the Toronto Raptors from 2001–03. “We lost to these kids. The one young man was wearing me out. I thought:

‘Who is this guy?’”

“This guy” happened to be Avery Bradley, who was rated by some polls as the top high school player in the country.

Impressed and intrigued, Williams started working with Findlay Prep as an assistant coach, albeit a part-time one, whenever he could shake himself free of other commitments.

After he retired as a player, Williams, a.k.a. the Junk Yard Dog, remained in demand for public appearances with the Raptors and the New York Knicks. He helped out with the NBA’s rookie-orientation program. The demands on his time didn’t stop there: A “visionary entrepreneur” according to his LinkedIn profile, Williams made the rounds as a corporate motivational speaker and life coach and founded the JYD Project, a non-profit with a goal “to motivate youth to excel academically, sustain a healthy lifestyle and increase their spiritual faith.”

Whatever role he filled, Williams hit on a signature theme: “Preparing children along the road to the workplace.” And wherever he went, Williams served as Findlay’s ambassador and roving scout. He eyeballed talented high school underclassmen. He networked and talked to recruits. He lent NBA cred to the program.

If Jerome Williams was going to throw himself into a full-time job, it figured that he’d latch onto a management position with an NBA club or a broadcasting gig. Instead, he signed up for the job as Findlay Prep’s coach and set about remaking the program in his own vision.

His initiatives wouldn’t quell criticisms that Findlay is a pro-hoops factory. He was not only going to coach but also teach a course in “Global Citizenship” that had at its core what he describes as “the various nuances of college and pro basketball.” He booked communications professionals to give the boys at Findlay Prep media training. He talked about plans to give them the basics in personal branding, holding up as an example how the Junk Yard Dog brand has served him so well.

Before the school year started, Williams ploughed into recruiting and had to fill nine slots on the roster vacated by seniors. He worked his established contacts, including those at Toronto’s CIA Bounce, from whence Anthony Bennett, Tristan Thompson and Jalen Poyser issued. In fact, one of the first players Williams landed was Dillon Brooks, a former teammate of Poyser’s at Father Henry Carr. “I was looking forward to playing with Jalen,” Brooks says. “I had gone to CIA Bounce and to coach [Mark] Poyser and asked him about Findlay. He’s like a second father to me. He told me that it was a good opportunity.”

Williams made his rounds of the media this summer and talked up the coming season for the Pilots, and he spoke glowingly of Poyser, prematurely as it turned out. Perhaps because this was his first year as the head coach, Williams hadn’t anticipated one by-product of his aggressive recruiting: the alienation of talent he had on hand, namely Poyser. “I heard rumours that he was recruiting players over me,” Poyser says. “I didn’t like it. I already had made my mark at that school. I would have been starting if coach Simon had been coming back.”

While he could recommend Findlay to Dillon Brooks with a clear conscience, Mark Poyser could just as clearly read the handwriting on the gym wall for his son. “Findlay was getting All-Americans going into their senior years,” he says. “[Williams] was going to be obliged to play them. Any coach would. This was going to be their year. Colleges want to see them play, not sit.”

By August, Mark Poyser was looking at other options for his son and found one that intrigued him in just about the unlikeliest of locales: Orangeville, Ont.

An AAU program based in Brampton, CIA Bounce has sent talent to the U.S. college ranks for better than a decade. While CIA Bounce could get the best Toronto-area players to major summer tournaments in the U.S. against state all-star teams, the program couldn’t provide much in the way of support over the course of a winter. High school hoops in Toronto didn’t offer much of a challenge for CIA Bounce’s top players, nor did it give them much of a chance to play in front of college recruiters. Thus, most of its best players had opted to do apprenticeships at U.S. preps, Findlay among them. There had never been an equivalent for basketball within the borders.

Enter the Tipping family of Orangeville and Longboat Key, Fla. James Tipping’s fortune tracks back to the transportation industry, and he was also involved in golf-course design and management. His two sons and two daughters were less interested in 18-wheelers and 18 holes than they were in 18-foot jump shots, so he opened up a state-of-the-art gym and health-club facility along Highway 9 outside of Orangeville. Lest you think that’s overindulging his brood, let it be known that they could hoop. His youngest son, Jameson, played at the IMG basketball academy in Florida and spent a couple of seasons with the University of Western Kentucky Hilltoppers before landing at Brock University. These days, Jameson is toiling with the Brampton A’s, a pro team in its first year in the National Basketball League. The A’s just happen to be owned by his father.

But let’s go back to the gym: The Tippings offered not only the usual slate of aerobics, yoga and weightlifting but also specialized training for hockey and an academy for golf. It seemed only natural to build on the family’s interest in basketball, so they launched a hoops academy back in the fall of 2012. This past summer, the Tippings engaged CIA Bounce to build a high school program that could compete on the U.S. prep circuit. Perhaps surprisingly, given what seemed like a well-established pipeline to U.S. prep schools, CIA Bounce’s head coach, Tony McIntyre, was open and even excited about a start-up program in Orangeville. McIntyre had three ball-playing sons who went the prep route, most notably Tyler Ennis, the kid who wore out Findlay Prep at the ESPN tournament in the spring. “I was away from my sons a lot over their years [at the preps],” McIntyre says. “I wish I had a chance to see them on a regular basis, even daily, without sacrificing anything in their development. A program in Orangeville would give a lot of players and parents a chance to do that.”

Those drawing up the plans dubbed the program Athlete Institute. They thought there was no sense taking a shot and leaving it short of the rim: CIA Bounce had the contacts around the courts to find talent to put on the floor and convince the Findlays and Huntingtons on the U.S. prep circuit to put the Orangeville team on their schedule. Though there’s no date set as yet, Findlay Prep has committed and Athlete Institute is trying to get the court at the Air Canada Centre on the undercard of a Raptors game. “We’re going to have a program that will be better than the IMG academy I went to,” Jameson Tipping says.

Even two months before the school year, it never seemed a sure thing that the program would get its wings this fall. There were a lot of logistics to be worked out. School work would be outsourced to Orangeville District Secondary School, where the players would fall into classes with the townies. The players would check into a humble motel on the outskirts of town, purchased by the Tippings, for the duration of the school year (a residence for players is being built beside the training centre). They would be bused to school and to the Tippings’ training centre every day. Meals would be lined up. All this would have to be done before the lights to the gym could be flipped on. “There were a lot of sleepless nights in the planning stage,” says Larry Blunt, a Virginia native who came over from CIA Bounce to coach the Athlete Institute team. “On top of all the other things, we needed to land top players to get momentum and make the program attractive to other top players.”

Enter Jalen Poyser. While Brooks and another national team member who trained at CIA Bounce, Justin Jackson, were heading to Findlay Prep, Poyser’s disenchantment with Williams’s recruiting had him looking for a soft place to land, one where he could play big minutes against the best players on the continent, one that could address his father’s concerns about school work. Thus did he take what amounted to a 40-inch vertical leap of faith and commit to a season in Orangeville. “He’s absolutely instrumental for a pioneering program,” McIntyre says. “He established legitimacy and gave it profile right off the bat.”

It’s not Poyser alone and it wouldn’t have been. “It needed to be a competitive situation,” Mark Poyser says. “Other players would have to be signing on.” And they did, foremost among them Jamal Murray of Kitchener, Ont., the MVP of the Jordan Brand Classic for international under-16 players this summer, and Nova Scotia’s Nevell Provo, a guard who had spent two seasons at Huntington Prep. Jalen Poyser’s aspirations of being a leader and a role model at Findlay had evolved into something else: “I want to show kids that you can stay here and get to D-I and the pros.”

At the start of the school year, the NCAA made rulings that sent a chill through the U.S. prep basketball scene. The NCAA declared Findlay and Huntington “non-academic institutions,” which made them off-limits to college coaches outside of scheduled games. That amounts to a very cold shower for the recruiters and recruited alike.
The NCAA also handed down a ruling that, going forward, limited students to one year at these preps in order to remain in good standing and eligible for Division I scholarships. While the slapdown was confined to Findlay and Huntington, others are bound to be under scrutiny, at the top of the list a newcomer to the circuit, Prime Prep, a Dallas academy founded by Prime Time himself, NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders.

Exactly where this will leave Athlete Institute is unclear. Program organizers are convinced that it will pass muster on its scholastics, but it’s not even clear that AI will fall under the NCAA’s jurisdiction, which would appear to be limited to the U.S. What is clear, however, is that Poyser wasn’t going to be able to finish his high school career at Findlay Prep. If he had gone back this fall, he was going to be looking for another place to play in a year’s time. For that matter, Brooks and Jackson will be in that position next spring and will have one year of high school eligibility remaining. “If Dillon and Justin were going to go [to Findlay], it’s probably better that they went this year,” Mark Poyser says. “If they’re coming to Athlete Institute next year, it could be the strongest team anywhere.”

For his part, the ever-positive Jerome Williams sounds unfazed by the NCAA sanctions and believes that Findlay Prep will be able to successfully appeal them. “We’re committed to doing good work here and that’s the only reason that I’m involved, to benefit kids in basketball, in their education and in their life,” Williams says with almost evangelical zeal.
As for Poyser, Williams expresses no hard feelings. “His decision isn’t a comment on our program,” Williams says. “He left here in good standing. The door is always open. He’s part of the family. But he made a professional decision. He went where he’s going to get minutes.”

Not good enough,” Larry Blunt yells. “Suicide.”

The players line up, some in mope, some in rage. “Enough of that s–t,” Jalen Poyser says to a teammate who missed a layup at the end of a five-man weave drill and pushed the coach over the edge.

“I don’t want to run.”

He does, though. They all do. End line, foul line, 10-second line, foul line. Poyser’s face starts with a smile and shatters into a grimace. At the head of the pack he looks over his shoulder. He knows it will be close. The buzzer sounds at 32 seconds. The tallest kid on the court straggles, just a couple of strides short of the end line.
“Not good enough. Again.”

Thirty-two seconds go back up on the clock. The hectoring escalates, Poyser is just one voice in the chorus. A thousand squeaks later, they cross the line, this time ahead of the buzzer. It spares them another suicide, another pound of sand in their legs.

A round of applause signals the end of practice. Poyser walks over to his father who is standing at courtside. Mark Poyser gives him a nudge on the shoulder, tells him that he has to remember to use his legs on his jumpshot and then gets out his keys for the drive back to the city.

Blunt interrupts the family moment. “You’ve got study hall after you change,” the coach yells.

The players head to the dressing room without a gripe, without so much as a word. It’s what they signed on for. That’s the mistake that the media and the NCAA make. The kids at the preps, they think, are looking for an easy way out. In reality, at Findlay, at Athlete Institute, at the other academies and preps, the kids have bought into something so hard it would break the toughest underclassman at a military academy. And for Poyser, the choice of Orangeville was clear-cut. Getting on ESPN, getting headlines, cruising down the Las Vegas Strip, hanging courtside at Runnin’ Rebels games, kicking back in plush digs, digging into catered meals: Findlay’s image, reputation and perks didn’t mean a thing in the end.

These days, Poyser enjoys the luxury of the top bunk at the modestly refurbished motel. If he misses the bus at 7 a.m., he and his teammates will run suicides for an hour or more. He’s a fish out of water at Orangeville District Secondary, to be sure: He’ll overhear two farmers’ kids discussing a combine harvester and wonder what the hell they’re talking about. No matter, Poyser wasn’t looking for something in his comfort zone. He went where he’d be pushed hardest. “I’m here until I graduate,” he says, pulling out his math textbook, looking disapprovingly at a score on his latest test, 70—less than the 90 he wants. “Findlay was a positive. It helped me as a player, but that’s in the past now. I don’t want to be moving around anymore. I’m going to get my grades. I’m going to get my minutes.”

Poyser, his teammates, the players at Findlay, Huntington or any other prep or academy want only one thing and it’s measured 60 seconds at a time. Given that, everything else will work out.