Recruiting Update: Jay Elmore (2018 South Eugene HS/Kimball Union Academy)

In today's basketball recruiting world, prep school offers a young man the chance to get additional exposure that he might not have gotten during his traditional high school career. Jay Elmore is hopeful that is the case for him. The solid 6-foot-2, 180-pound guard had a great career at South Eugene High School and had some good college options, but decided to take an extra year to continue playing and see if some more and different programs might take interest.

This spring, Elmore investigated what opportunities he might have and decided to head to the other side of the country for his prep year at Kimball Union Academy in Plainfield, New Hampshire. "I wanted to come to the East Coast and after whitting it down from ten schools, I visited four schools and Kimball Union was the best fit for me," Elmore said. "It was the best fit for me as a person and as a basketball player."

With his decision made, he was able to play another summer of AAU basketball. He laced up his gym shoes and ran with Team Flight again and was grateful for the experience. "We did better than I thought we would do," Elmore said. "We had a young group but we did well and I really enjoyed it. At the beginning of the summer I wasn't too happy with the way I was playing but by Anaheim and Las Vegas I felt that I played my best. I made shots and we beat a lot of good teams."

On terms of his recruitment, the extra summer didn't necessarily change things too much as Elmore noted that many of the same schools that were recruiting him at South Eugene are still in contact with him, namely Whitman and Redlands. But he's confident that things will pick up for him this fall as schools come to Kimball Union in open gyms and watch him play well. Then it will be onto the regular season where good performances against top-notch prep school competition will no doubt get him on the radar of high D-II as well as D-I programs.

"I definitely think it's likely to happen for me out here," Elmore said. "I've gotten a lot better since my junior year and I'm getting a fresh start here. I just want to compete. We've got a good team - we're kind of small but we have a couple of guys going D-I already. It's a really tough league but I'm really looking forward to it."