Coach’s Take: Kingdom Hoops Elite 17U (Part II)
Tony Roe, Travis Hines and I certainly provided our fair share of player evaluations this spring and summer, but we thought we’d give the guys who know the kids best a chance to be vocal: the coaches. Jake Sullivan —…
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Continue ReadingTony Roe, Travis Hines and I certainly provided our fair share of player evaluations this spring and summer, but we thought we’d give the guys who know the kids best a chance to be vocal: the coaches.
Jake Sullivan — Kingdom Hoops Program Director
Charley Crowley, 6’8 PF, Valley
“Charley has always been really, really skilled, and his challenge was just learning how to be consistent and how to play hard all the time. Charley is a very free-sprited, free-loving kid, every kid on the team loves him, and you can’t but help just love being around Charley. His challenge — and I think he’s learned this at Valley under Coach (BJ) Windhorst — is just learning that he has to be his best on every possession. And that’s really what he did this whole season for us, he was excellent. And he’s got a lot of stuff in the works; some D2 offers, I know he’s been to UMKC for an unofficial visit and their elite camp, and University of Lafayette and Navy, some schools like that have reached out and shown some strong interest in him. He has a 28 on his ACT, a 3.4 GPA, he’s a high academic kid which is really going to help his recruiting process. He had a great July, and that really laid a foundation for him to have a great season at Valley, and then take that into college.”
Quinton Curry, 6’6 F, Valley
“You probably could not have had a more depressing situation for us and for him. He tore his ACL six days before the NCAA live periods started at a high school team camp down at Drake. He’s an unbelievable kid, a kid that makes his life on way more than just athletics. He’s going to be successful no matter what the story has for him at the end of the day. He received a handful of Division II offers in the spring, and a bunch of Division I interest heading into July and then obviously he wasn’t able to compete. He’s just working now to get healthy and to get back as quickly as he can, I think a timetable for him is to be back mid-January for Valley, and then see where the chips may fall. Quinton was kind of the heart and soul from a leadership perspective for our team, and he’s a kid who I think will bounce back and have a very, very good college career.”
Tajen Ross, 6’2 G, ADM
He’s really physically developed. He’s been a kid that’s been with us for four of five years and he was always playing on our B teams — he was just physically behind in terms of his development. And over the last 12 months his body began to change, and his competitive drive began to change and he’s really become an excellent basketball player. And we saw the success he was having on our second team, our Red team, and asked if he wanted to play on our Elite team and he say ‘no, I want to stay on the Red team, I want to grow, I want to develop, I want to become a leader.’ More for his high school situation at ADM than anything else. And then the last weekend in July he decided he wanted to play with the Elite team and he was the reason why we were able to beat the MOKAN Select group, and why we made the run that we did in Lawrence. He just committed to Minnesota-Crookston, he just felt it was a great fit for him, and he pulled the trigger early and became our first commit of the year, so we’re excited for him. His ceiling is so high, he’s the guy that people could be talking about a lot as he becomes a junior and senior in college.”
Stephen Glenn, 6’1 G, Grand View Christian
“He can really shoot the ball, and he’s going to be a huge part of what Grand View Christian does as they strive to get back to another state tournament. It will be interesting to see how he evolves in terms of his college career, he’s going to play college basketball, it should be interesting to see what level he gets to. He’s an unbelievable shooter, he may end up leading the state of Iowa in 3-pointers made with the way that Grand View Christian plays. And he’s a kid that walked into our gym as a seventh-grader and had never played high-school basketball before outside of a few camps here-and-there. He could barely dribble, had no idea how to really shoot, and was a kid who just fell in love with the game — and he worked and worked and worked, and got to the point where he became a really important member of our Elite team, coming off the bench knocking down shots. And he’s going to do the same thing at Grand View Christian this year — I think he had a 40 point game last year and I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a few of those games out of him this year.”