Tension in Brampton high schools circles is mounting between local high profile club team CIA/Bounce and several schools in the Brampton area with highly ranked teams. Seven grade ten and eleven players have been sent south to prep schools in the past six months. Some have been moved during the middle of the semester. This has crippled the d'Youville, Campion and St. Augustine high school programs all of whom would be better teams if these kids had stayed home. The high school coaches are feeling betrayed because they were not consulted about the moves. My understanding is that all of these kids have been reclassified to a lower grade so the prep schools can get an extra year of eligibility out of them. There has been an uneasy truce between the individuals who run the club teams and the high school coaches for some time. Maybe it's time we had an honest debate about the merits of shipping underage kids to the States. Hopefully now that the issue is out in the open the dialogue can begin in the Brampton basketball community.

Kudos to the coaching staff at Cathedral for the classy new website celebrating Cathedral basketball. It is well crafted, informative and the best highschool team website in Canada.

Cathedral and St. Thomas More H.S. are both top ten schools in the province and both deserve to go to OFSAA this year. Unfortunately, one of the two will have to stay home due to the GHAC only having one bid this year. Both teams seem evenly matched and its seems a pity both cannot go to the big dance in March.

THE RECRUITING TRAIL

Adam Folker, the 6'8" forward from Markham DHS has really blown up this season and is now the best basketball prospect ouside of Evadlas Zabas left in Canada. Several Division I teams have jumped into the picture in the last two months and Adam is now qualified through the clearing house. More significantly Carleton University has now jumped into the recruiting race and maybe the favourite if Folker stays in Canada. This tells you two things - the talent is really down in Ottawa and Eastern Ontario which is forcing Carleton to look for talent in the GTA where they rarely venture. It also speaks volumes about how powerful Carleton's recruiting allure is when they can wait until halfway through the school year and move ahead of schools like Western, Queens and Memorial who have been recruiting Folker for a very long time. Like the great UCLA dynasty of the 60's and 70's, Carleton gets almost any high school player they want.

The hot spot for recruiting in Central/Western Ontario this year is the Niagara Peninsula and Hamilton where Brock is getting lots of competition for blue chip prospects Travis Berry, Cam Michaud, Justin Boutillier, Steve Priolo and John Corbacio. If Brock can keep most of this talent hime they will avoid a major rebuilding job next year because they are losing a boatload of talent this spring to graduation. Windsor, Western and McMaster are raiding the area hoping to lure most of the significant talent out of the area. If the Niagara Region had set up a toll booth between Hamilton and Grimsby, they would have made a small fortune from CIS coaches travelling down the QEW to see the best prospects in the Peninsula. This group is the best talent to come out of the St. Catherines, Niagara Falls and Welland area in the past 5 years.

Yours in basketball,

Jim Thomas

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