End of prep basketball season means decision-making season for top NC hoops recruit

Editor’s note: This is the second in an occasional series exploring what it’s like to be a top college basketball recruit in 2023. Read the first story in the series here.

Almost as quickly as it had begun, his junior season ended after a one-point defeat in the second round of the state playoffs, a loss as crushing as it was swift. A four-hour trip home awaited Jarin Stevenson and his teammates at Seaforth High. The Seahawks boarded their bus in Beaufort, the site of their final game, and settled in for the long ride through the night.

For most, the finality blended into the rhythms of high school. There were upcoming assignments and tests, prom in May and then maybe the start of a summer job after finals. For Stevenson, among the best basketball prospects in the class of 2024, the end of the high school season meant the hardest work was now upon him. The most defining months of his young life had arrived.

It wasn’t hyperbole, given the stakes. At 6-foot-10 and 200 pounds, with a father who played professionally overseas and a mother who played at North Carolina, Stevenson has the genes and the necessary physical gifts; he has come to possess a lottery ticket, of sorts, worth millions in future earnings, one that promises all the acclaim that comes with a high-level pro basketball career.

Cashing in that ticket over the next few years, though, will be the difficult part. For so long the journey from high school to the NBA, where Stevenson aspires to be, has followed a mostly conventional path. It changed over the years, slowly at first, and now there seems to be an endless list of choices facing Stevenson, each one with its own perils and promises.

“It’s starting to seem like we have too many options,” Stevenson’s dad, Jarod, said with a laugh one day last month, a few weeks after the end of the high school season. By then Jarin was already two weeks into practices with Team United, his Charlotte-based AAU team, and the team had already traveled to Atlanta for its first tournament.

So began a months-long sprint to July and the Peach Jam, the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League tournament long considered to be among the most crucial proving grounds for teenagers who aspire to establish their basketball mettle. It’d be here soon enough. For now, more immediate concerns, like all those looming questions and decisions, feel urgent for Stevenson and his family.

Deciding on the right path to the NBA

There are many of those questions, each one a potential path to success — or a roadblock that could delay it, depending on what might happen. Who can be sure which way is the right way?

Stevenson can return for his senior year at Seaforth, where the competition lacks, but also where he has the best chance to be a relatively normal kid before the craze of college and the pros. There, too, he can most benefit from the tutelage of his parents, both of whom coach his high school team. Perhaps that remains the safest choice, to stay where he’s been.

Or he can go to one of the several prep schools that have contacted his family over the past several months, attempting to sell Stevenson on the idea that they’d best prepare him for the next level. Such schools, like Oak Hill Academy and IMG Academy and Montverde Academy, have long established themselves as attractive destinations for elite high school players.

Then there are the newest options. Overtime Elite, the Atlanta-based academy-model program that opened two years ago, has already attracted some of the best young talent in the country to a campus with sparkling facilities and modern accouterments, including nutritionists and a social media team that helps its players curate their brands. The NBA’s own G League Ignite, meanwhile, offers six-figure salaries and the chance for Stevenson to essentially become a pro right now, years before he’d be eligible for the NBA Draft.

“Straight up professionals,” is how Stevenson’s mom, Nicole, described the G League Ignite roster, which is a mix of teenagers and older men playing to keep alive their basketball dreams. There was a hint of admiration in her voice, but also concern.

“Do I want my 17-, 18-year-old son playing with 30-year-old men?” she asked. “And then the lifestyle that comes along with it?”

The option to reclassify

During the past few months, one more option had emerged, too, and it immediately became the most dramatic of all: Stevenson could skip ahead of all of the other potential steps, graduate high school early and reclassify into the class of 2023. Doing so would allow him to go to college next fall (or accept a salary from Overtime Elite or the NBA’s G League Ignite) and become eligible for the 2024 NBA Draft.

The option to reclassify had become “what he really wants to do,” Jarod Stevenson said. The academic component of it was the least of anyone’s concerns. Jarin, who takes most of his classes online, entered the final part of his junior year with a GPA of nearly 4.5, and ranked second in his class, his mom said. But his parents worried about the basketball part; about the leap from a small 2-A school, which didn’t offer Stevenson much competition, to what he’d experience at a high-level college.

“That’s a big jump,” Jarod said. “We’re like, ‘Hold on, Jarin, you need to slow down a little bit.’”

The calendar, though, won’t slow down, and neither will the changing landscape of college basketball and the once-well-worn path to advance beyond it. What was once clear has become muddled. Now there are more and more options for players of Stevenson’s caliber, more academies or programs that promise the best way for coveted prospects to maximize their potential. And players, too, more and more appear in a hurry to grow up and get somewhere.

In the days after his high school season ended, Stevenson anticipated the months to come, the decisions in front of him, and he predicted it all would be “one of the most important time spans of my life.”

“It’s definitely pivotal,” he said.

Weighing a college commitment

The most conventional and traditional path — commit to playing at a college, spend another year in high school, go onto the next level content to develop at whatever pace unfolded — is the one Stevenson seems most resistant to following. He’s hardly alone. College basketball long ago ceased to be a sport in which the best of the best remained satisfied in sticking around.

Now it’s a sprint, with those good enough to play in the NBA entering school with a desire to prove that ability as quickly as possible. That’s the goal that most dominates Stevenson’s thoughts, even as a high school junior: Which path would allow him the surest journey to the NBA? Which college would best prepare him, in the least amount of time?

He has possessed a scholarship offer from North Carolina since his sophomore year, and for more than a year now the assumption among those who follow recruiting has been that Stevenson will go there. The rationale is easy enough to understand: Stevenson’s mom, Nicole, played there, after all, and when the family returned from South Korea, where Jarod had a long and successful pro basketball career, it chose to make a life in Chapel Hill, where the Stevensons long kept a home.

But now it’s late into Jarin Stevenson’s junior year — a time at which a lot of coveted prospects have already made their college decisions — and he’s still undecided. In addition to all of the other options, the South Korean National Team had started to recruit him, too, given his father’s Korean roots. If Stevenson joined the South Korean program he could also become eligible to join the NBA’s Global Academy in Australia.

Meanwhile, other colleges have entered the picture, or were trying to. Coaches from Duke contacted Jarod last winter and asked if, indeed, Jarin’s recruitment really is open. It is, Jarod said, and soon enough Amile Jefferson, one of the Blue Devils’ assistants under Jon Scheyer, sat courtside at Seaforth during one of Stevenson’s games.

Not long after that, UNC coach Hubert Davis responded by attending his second Seaforth game of the season, this time with most of his coaching staff sitting in a line next to him. They spent the game along the baseline, Davis next to Jeff Lebo, who was next to Brad Frederick, who was next to Sean May, who’d helped lead the Tar Heels to the 2005 national championship.

Davis and his coaches have remained committed to closing the deal. Stevenson has remained committed to being uncommitted. It’s hard for him to resist the overtures — “he’s sort of like a people pleaser person,” Jarod said, and that was something he and Nicole have been working on with Jarin, that he needs to be more assertive.

“They’re pushing for it,” Jarin said, of UNC’s staff wanting him to commit.

‘I don’t want to rush things’

Among the class of 2024, the Tar Heels already have commitments from four prospects ranked among the top 40 in the country, according to 247Sports.com: Ian Jackson (No. 3), Elliot Cadeau (10th), Drake Powell (36th) and James Brown (38th). It’s a class that’s already ranked first, and one that would become even stronger if Stevenson, ranked 12th nationally in his class according to 247, became a part of it.

He’s not budging.

“They’re wondering when I’ll commit,” he said one day in February, after a Seaforth practice. “But I’m going to just take my time and look for the right situation. I don’t want to rush things and put myself in a bad situation where I can’t show all of my ability.”

He wasn’t necessarily speaking only about UNC, but about everywhere. College basketball has become a revolving door of player movement, of transfers and rosters that are impossible to predict. It has become difficult for coaches to know what their teams might look like year to year, and even more difficult for prospects to judge potential opportunities without knowing how much playing time might be available or who they might be competing against for that time.

If Stevenson is to graduate a year early, a decision he’d have to make by July, then “the colleges that we look at might be completely different than the colleges we may look at next year,” Nicole said. These days she finds herself talking “my husband’s head off” while analyzing all the possibilities, from the prep schools to the colleges that want their youngest son.

North Carolina and N.C. State both have offered scholarships; Duke likely would have already if not for the thought that Stevenson is most likely to wind up at UNC. Virginia also is in aggressive pursuit, along with Missouri. Florida State and Arkansas and Alabama, among others, have expressed more interest in recent months, too, while Stevenson and his parents considered schools’ recent track records, and evaluated which would offer him the best chance of proving himself.

“Players that have been through there — did they get drafted?” Jarod asked. “Did they get better? That’s the biggest part, did they get better while they were there?”

Those prep school basketball factories

In a time of constant change in college basketball, it has become almost impossible for prospects to look too far ahead. Name, image and likeness deals have added another layer to consider during a recruitment. The transfer portal, meanwhile, makes roster composition a guessing game. And now it’s harder than ever, too, for high schoolers to weigh their more immediate options.

The environment at Seaforth, at least, offers Stevenson the familiar comforts of home and the charms of high school basketball. The cheerleaders last season often chanted his name after a dunk or some other highlight; a small but vocal student section cheered his every move. In a January home game, Stevenson made the game-winning shot at the buzzer in a one-point victory against Burlington Cummings High, and his classmates rushed onto the court to mob him in celebration.

It was a small moment, but a memorable one, a slice-of-life reminder of what sports can be, especially in high school. It was the kind of moment that’d been nonexistent about a week earlier in another high school gym about 30 minutes east, in Raleigh, where two of Overtime Elite’s teams had traveled for a couple of days of games at Word of God Academy.

Word of God, where John Wall starred in the late 2000s before going onto Kentucky and then the NBA, had become one of those prep school basketball factories, and Overtime was now the next big thing, as strong of a bet as any to become the model of the future for high schoolers with the talent and ambition to reach the NBA.

On a Monday night in mid-January, one of Overtime’s teams, the Cold Hearts, prevailed with a one-point victory against Winston-Salem Christian Academy, another prep school with a basketball focus. In the second game of a double-header another Overtime team, the City Reapers, easily defeated Word of God. Both games, played in a packed gym, took on the feel of a high-level exhibition; the intensity was there even if the authenticity, like the defense, was a bit lacking.

Just about every player who goes to Overtime (and even Word of God) arrives with great basketball expectations. The Cold Hearts’ roster included the likes of Rob Dillingham, a Hickory native and top-10 prospect in the class of 2023, who is bound for Kentucky, as well as Naasir Cunningham, arguably the top prospect in the class of 2024. Cunningham became the eighth five-star prospect to join OTE in the past two years, and his decision further cemented its arrival as a serious player.

“We’re getting the top of the top training, we’re playing against the best competition — lottery picks,” Cunningham said after the first of the Cold Hearts’ games in Raleigh in mid-January. “And we still get to go to college; we’re still getting an education — so it’s like everything that we can ask.”

A glimpse at the future of basketball

There can be no doubt about the bonafides of OTE, from a basketball perspective. Its coaches include Kevin Ollie and Dave Leitao, both of whom came to OTE with experience at major colleges (Ollie at Connecticut and Leitao at Virginia). OTE employs a bevy of support personnel, including a general manager, scouts, a data scientist and someone in charge of the player experience.

On the other hand, it’s fair to wonder about the unintended consequences of teenagers entering a quasi-professional environment, away from home and often without the support of the people who’d guided their path. It’s fair to wonder, too, about the risks of hurrying through adolescence in pursuit of a dream, or whether realizing that dream now necessitated such a rush.

Cunningham, for one, didn’t feel like he was missing anything. He moved to the OTE campus in Atlanta from Gladstone, New Jersey, “and the only thing I can really say I miss would be like maybe chilling with my friends on the weekends back home” he said. “But teammates here, they welcome you. You feel like you’re back home and you make new friends out here — and everything is great.”

Later that night, Cunningham and his teammates watched the City Reapers put on a show against Word of God. Trey Parker, bound for N.C. State, led the Reapers with 23 points, while Amen and Ausar Thompson, twins projected to be picked among the top five of the NBA Draft this summer, scored 17 apiece. A D.J. narrated the action as hip-hop beats thumped over the loudspeakers during breaks, giving the game the feel of something from the old And1 Mixtape Tour.

Instead, though, the scene is likely the future. Mitch Kupchak, the general manager of the Charlotte Hornets, settled into a seat in the far corner of the bleachers, undoubtedly to watch the Thompsons. A basketball court full of ambitious teenagers hoped to catch his eye.

‘I’m not soft’

Jarin Stevenson could have been a part of the spectacle upon OTE’s arrival at Word of God, had he wanted. OTE attempted to recruit him last summer, and made its pitch to Stevenson and his parents during a presentation over Zoom, in lieu of a family visit to Atlanta.

“We were thinking it’d help him a lot, basketball-wise, just to really get used to a pro-, college-like situation,” Jarod Stevenson said. “Just to have that adjustment period before he actually does it.

“We were pretty high on doing that.”

Instead, though, Jarin remained at Seaforth, where the team’s success depended largely on how he played. His parents designed it that way, in part, and hoped the experience of leading an ordinary high school team might coax some toughness out of Stevenson, and might force him to exert his will over less talented players.

Sometimes it worked, but it often didn’t, with college coaches sometimes wondering why Stevenson didn’t dominate more; why he sometimes appeared reluctant to take over. “Soft” is a word Stevenson has heard used against him; it became a label he wanted to shed, even if it wasn’t yet a widely-held opinion.

“I want to showcase that I’m not soft,” he said one day last month, after the high school season was over. “I guess a lot of people feel like I play soft. And I feel like I’ve got to showcase that I’m not just soft, or a pushover.

“I feel like I can do that over the next few months. And I’ve got to showcase all my skills. I feel like I haven’t really showcased all of it, especially consistently, I guess. I’ve only done it in little time spurts. So I feel like I’ve got to showcase that.”

Stevenson still averaged 21.5 points, 11.6 rebounds and nearly four blocks per game, all the while usually managing a big smile while he over-matched mostly average high school competition. He led Seaforth, in its second year of existence and without any seniors, to the second round of the state playoffs, where it suffered a last-second loss at East Carteret High.

The long ride home followed and, then, the announcement in mid-March that Stevenson had earned Gatorade North Carolina Player of the Year, arguably the most prestigious honor any high school player can claim in a given state.

Past North Carolina winners include Rodney Rodgers and Jerry Stackhouse, Chris Paul and Coby White. Paul won it 20 years ago, before spending two years at Wake Forest on his way to becoming an NBA All-Star. White won it five years ago before becoming a one-and-done sensation at UNC. When Stevenson posted news of the award on Instagram, it inspired a predictable flood of comments from fans urging him to commit to their school.

“Bring that heat to the heels!!!!” went one, replete with a fire emoji, before N.C. State and Missouri fans chimed in with their own pleas. For Stevenson, though, a college decision remains a long way off. Perhaps he’ll have one by the end of the summer, and perhaps it’ll be to enter college later this year instead of the next. That’s but one of the decisions facing him these days.

College basketball over the past year or two has become a sport defined by constant change, an enterprise in flux. The ripples extend well beneath the surface.

Stevenson and the next generation of talent now confront uncertainties that didn’t exist until recently. Suddenly, the most defining moments of his young basketball life are upon him.