As a follower of college sports, my interest in high school sports has been mixed. Part of the problem is something Luke Winn documented last summer. Far too many high school students change their minds for me to get too wrapped up in any recruiting decision.

ESPN managed to make a fairly compelling evening out of Nerlens Noel and Shabazz Muhammad deciding to attend Kentucky and UCLA. But I will be the first person to admit that I don’t closely follow the recruiting process until prospects formally enroll in college.

When I started writing about college basketball, my favorite columns were look-back columns that criticized the high school rankings. I loved to savage the McDonald’s All-American teams and make fun of Top 50 recruits who were busts. But now that I’ve entered into the business of making predictions, I realize how valuable that high school data can be. Yes, recruiting rankings are not perfect. Players are at a development stage and almost anything can happen. But there is real information in the detailed scouting that takes place.

Drew Cannon is one of the sports’ future recruiting experts, as he has demonstrated interest in both scouting high school players and improving our statistical understanding of these players. I recently spoke to Drew and he mentioned how easy it is to see most of the Top 100 recruits by attending only a handful of AAU events. Drew has been working to build data on these summer events and use it to predict college performance.

And while there is no question that the AAU circuit is the place to go to see elite high school talent in action, I was curious to see if there was any similar locus of talent among high school or prep school teams. Drew noted that the elite high schools are common knowledge among the recruiting experts. But for those of us who don’t study high school recruiting on a regular basis, I wanted to look back and see what we could learn from the last decade’s worth of data.

RealGM.com has a huge database of players from high school to the pro ranks, and while we do not have data on every player’s high school or prep school history, we do have data for a substantial number of players. Today, I decided to look at which high schools have been producing the most productive college players.

I started by calculating the Points Produced (PP) for every D1 player from 2003 to 2012. PP is the numerator of the ORtg formula. It is a metric that assigns value for points based on scoring, assists, and offensive rebounds. Then I added this total up by the last prep school attended by everyone to play D1 college basketball in the last decade. The next table shows the prep schools with the highest total points produced at the college level in the decade.

Reading the chart from left to right, graduates of Hargrave Military Academy produced 50,868 points in college while playing 235 individual college seasons in the last 10 years. That was 81 distinct players, 23 of which were ranked in the RSCI top 100, and 42 of whom played in a BCS conference.

I was a little bit shocked at how prolific players from Hargrave Military Academy have been. DeShawn Painter had a pretty successful season for NC State last year, playing in 37 games for the Wolfpack, and producing 228 points over the course of the year. And yet Painter’s season ranked 100th on the Hargrave Military Academy List out of 235 single seasons.

Josh Howard might be the most famous player to come out of Hargrave Military Academy in recent years, and his situation explains why so many players have attended Hargrave. Howard didn’t have the SAT scores to get into Wake Forest, but by attending Hargrave for a year, he was able to meet Wake Forest’s academic requirements.

Hargrave’s most prolific single college seasons belonged to players like Xavier’s Jordan Crawford, West Virginia’s Joe Alexander, Pittsburgh’s Sam Young, Mississippi St.’s Dee Bost and Wake Forest’s Josh Howard. Loyola (MD)’s Andre Collins actually produced the most points in a single season after attending Hargrave Military Academy, but I’m guessing few people remember his brilliant 2006 campaign.

Despite producing a ridiculous number of high school players, Hargrave Military Academy hasn’t necessarily been the home of a number of elite prospects. PJ Hairston and Vernon Macklin are the only two RSCI Top 20 prospects to come out of Hargrave and play college ball in the last decade. (Josh Howard was ranked 87th by Dave Telep, and was not a consensus Top 100 player out of high school.)

Other Schools

If you had asked me before running the numbers which school I had expected to produce the most D1 players, I would have said Oak Hill Academy. Oak Hill has clearly been one of the leading prep schools for most of the last decade. From Carmelo Anthony to Ty Lawson, from Rajon Rondo to Doron Lamb, from Eric Devendorf to Nolan Smith, Oak Hill has always had its share of big name prospects.

I might have thought Notre Dame prep would have produced more points given some of the big names to go through the school. But Michael Beasley only played one season in college. Sometimes producing college talent isn’t the same thing as producing NBA talent.

Still, even if they aren’t NBA stars, many of these programs are good at generating effective college players. The Laurinburg Institute might not be one of the top schools you think of in terms of scouting elite prep school talent. There have only been a handful of super elite players at the school. Do you remember Memphis recruit Shawne Williams? But Delroy James became a star at Rhode Island. Draelon Burns was a key player at DePaul. Quantez Robertson was a key player for Auburn. And when you add up 123 seasons of college ball in the last decade, the Laurinburg Institute has seen its share of talented players stop in for a visit.

Perhaps my biggest question is when we will see some international scouting of prep school level players. Why hasn’t a single member of the Australian Institute of Sport been ranked in the RSCI Top 100? Hint: St. Mary’s would like me to stop mentioning this fact now. From Patty Mills to Matt Dellavedova, St. Mary’s has benefited tremendously from the fact that very few scouts evaluate the Australian players.

But in the end, it would appear high school ball is not quite AAU ball. According to the table, Top 100 talent is spread out among many high schools. Oak Hill is the exception, not the rule.