This weekend’s three-day Sunshine Classic at Montverde Academy showcases two top contenders for national player of the year honors and an Eagles team that has a chance to be acclaimed as the best high school boys basketball team ever.
Montverde’s 6-foot-9 do-it-all Duke senior signee Cooper Flagg is the No. 1-rated 2024 prospect after skipping his junior season to get to the next levels sooner rather than later.
He’ll match up Friday night against Miami Columbus junior Cameron Boozer (6-9), who was named Mr. Basketball national player of the year last season by BallisLife as the first sophomore to receive an honor that dates to 1955. Boozer was rated just ahead of Flagg by most scouting services when both were in the class of 2025.
Elsewhere in a huge early season hoops week, Bob Harvey celebrates his 36th and final year as tournament director of the storied Rotary Tip-Off Classic at Winter Park High School and nationally ranked Oak Ridge hosts a strong lineup of games at Saturday’s Breast Cancer Awareness Classic.
Olympia snaps OCP boys basketball streak with milestone win | Rotary Tip-Off
Montverde (4-0) returned six major college-bound seniors, including signees 6-9 Asa Newell (Georgia), 6-7 Liam McNeeley (Indiana) and 6-2 Curtis Givens (LSU). Derik Queen, a 6-10 center, is signing late and has a final four of Houston, Indiana, Kansas and Maryland.
Elite point guard Robert Wright III, a Baylor signee and Pennsylvania player of the year award winner last season, arrived at Montverde in August.
The Eagles opened by crushing four good teams by an average score of 89-54 last week — two in Utah Monday and Tuesday and two more in Dallas on Friday and Saturday. That included an 88-53 dismantling of a Wasatch Academy (Utah), which is No. 6 in the FAB 50 National Team Ranking.
Many of the independent and academy teams that have forever changed high school basketball reload each year by plucking 4- and 5-star rising seniors off other rosters….
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