Why one former player wanted to create 'a new ecosystem' for Canadian basketball
Orangeville Prep co-founder Jesse Tipping on why he felt Canadian high school basketball had to change
When something you love is broken, you can't help but be compelled to fix it. For Orangeville Prep co-founder Jesse Tipping, the thing he loved was basketball. But the more time he spent in the game, the more he realized that in Canada, the player development system was broken.
Back around the turn of the millennium, Tipping was a promising high school baller who had hopes of getting a scholarship to an NCAA Division 1 school. Unfortunately, he found his development being short-circuited again and again by things out of his control: school strikes, teams being shut down, and rules about students transferring schools for athletics — all were a problem. His experience left him with several criticisms of traditional high school basketball: it wasn't geared toward developing high-level players, players were explicitly banned from transferring schools for athletic reasons, and oftentimes the best players didn't get to play each other.
"You'd always hear, 'Oh if only [Etobicoke Catholic league powerhouse] Henry Carr played against [Toronto public school] Eastern, or if only so-and-so school out of Niagara Falls played against them,'" he says."So all the best schools, whether they're Catholic or public or private, they didn't get to play against each other, unless by chance they met in OFSAA."
On the other hand, there was AAU. Officially speaking, the AAU is the Amateur Athletic Union, a governing body for amateur sport in the United States, but in basketball, it's used as a shorthand to talk about a series of spring and summertime exposure tournaments for teenaged players. Many of today's NBA stars first made their names in the AAU, and Tipping admits that it was the success of GTA-based AAU teams that first made American scouts sit up and take notice of Canadian talent. But because the AAU isn't affiliated with schools, they have no way of making sure players are academically eligible to play collegiate ball.
In the United States, though, there was a third option: prep school ball. High-level basketball programs that were either school-based or had an agreement with a school to send their players there and make sure they had what it took to make it to the next level in the classroom, as well. Starting in the late '90s, more and more of Canada's top players started going south while still in high school to play for prep schools like New Jersey's St. Patrick High and Texas' Christian Life Center Academy. What Tipping wanted to do was keep them in Canada and give them that same experience here. Initially, the basketball establishment wasn't sold on the model. OFSAA, the governing body of high school sports in Ontario, wasn't interested in his plan. AAU coaches, meanwhile, insisted that trying to keep kids from going to the States was a fool's errand.
"They all said it'll never work, all the best players will always go to the States first," he said.
There was one exception, though. Tony McIntyre was the coach of a Brampton-based AAU team called CIA Bounce. He met with Tipping after Orangeville's first season in 2012 and was impressed with what he saw. He agreed to start steering his players there for their high school careers, and eventually agreed to come on as coach.
"Going into our second year, Tony came on board and we started a second team," he says. "And then from there we just kept refining the product… That second year is when Jamal [Murray, Orangeville's most successful alumni to date] came, so we started getting more high profile players, taking them to all the exposure tournaments, kind of just kept trying to become better."
But Tipping didn't just want Orangeville to be the lone Canadian school playing in U.S.-based tournaments and having the odd exhibition game against other Canadian schools.
"We needed to accomplish certain things," he says. "Why were kids going down to the U.S.? Well everybody's seen the movies Hoosiers, Love & Basketball, and all these great high school [movies.] And you've got these big crowds, you've got these big atmospheres of lineage, and crowds of people who care, and that's what they want… I didn't take that for granted. And part of that was, they needed a championship to strive for."
What that meant was, in effect, Tipping had to start helping the competition. There were already people in the Ontario basketball scene who were interested in creating a prep-type league, where the top teams from different cities and different leagues could play each other. Tipping quickly joined, and eventually began spearheading the effort.
"When I first started the school, [I] really learned where you can get games," he says. "So I saw all of these schools and programs. Some of them were schools like a Henry Carr, with [longtime coach Paul] Melnick, who was always trying to always build a better roster… You start to hear the appetite of what everyone's trying to do or what their grumblings are. So at the early stages, when I saw a prep league trying to be started, I jumped on."
A key part of the puzzle was getting the Ontario Basketball Association — the governing body for amateur basketball in the province — on board.
"I need someone to govern this who does have more credibility than, say, myself," he says. "I need somebody to stamp this as this is not being a money-squeezing operation that's just like squeezing tournament checks out of people or something."
In 2016, the Ontario Scholastic Basketball Association played its first season. Today, there are 14 boys teams and 14 girls teams. It includes public, Catholic, and private schools, as well as programs like Orangeville, that have agreements to send their players to one specific school, but aren't officially affiliated with it.
Tipping also helped start the Biosteel All-Canadian game, an analogue to the prestigious McDonald's All-American game, which sees the best Canadian high school players, whether they're based in Canada or the U.S. compete in an all-star game every spring.
One thing Tipping is very clear on is that school matters at Orangeville Prep. It is not a so-called "diploma mill" — the name given to academically questionable, basketball first, fly-by-night operations that became endemic in U.S. high school basketball in the '00s, before NCAA crackdowns put them out of business. His kids take the same courses as everyone else at Orangeville District Secondary, the school where Orangeville Prep sends their players, and they're held to the same standards, save for some allowances that are made for the Bears' travel schedule.
"This is not about 'We want grades, they just have to be here so they can come play basketball,'" he says. "We gave every teacher the ability to withhold them from our competition. If a teacher said 'He's not passing and he's not eligible to play for [Orangeville District] sports,' he's not eligible to play for our sports either."
Tipping is still trying to build both his program and high school basketball in Canada as a whole. Next season, Orangeville Prep will field its first girls' team. He's advising programs in other provinces. (Quebec has "so much talent, I would argue as much as Ontario," he says.) And he's just "creating a new ecosystem, solving problems that I needed solved when I was in high school."
While he knows that a certain number of players will always go to the States, he's happy to have created a system where they don't have to. And it looks like the kids are happy about it, too.
"When we started, 70 per cent of the Canadian high school basketball players were getting scholarships out of U.S. prep schools," he says. "Now that's completely switched."
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