MODE Prep tips off Grind Session schedule with play-in event in Kentucky

Until very recently, the national prep boys basketball team at MODE Prep was little more than a dream. This weekend those dreams become reality.

But that reality is still mired in challenges for the nascent prep circuit program being run in conjunction with Liberty Launch Academy in Liberty Lake.

“Four months ago this was an idea, and now it’s reality,” MODE Prep coach Jon Adams said at the school on Tuesday. “We leave (Wednesday) for our first tournament. We obviously have big ambitions, but building a program from scratch is not easy. There’s more that goes into it than anybody knows.”

Some of those ambitions – a junior national team and high school varsity team – had to be put on hold for this season, even though they have already broken ground on a state of the art gymnasium and physical education building on school property that they hope to have open by the start of school next year.

“We just ran out of time,” Adams said. “We said, ‘Let’s focus on one national team this year,’ It gets us out there.”

It is not for lack of interest in the program, Adams said. He receives daily calls from players and parents wanting information on the program. But with everything that goes into readying a national program for the season, they wanted to make sure it had what it needed to be successful.

“We’ll learn everything about the schedule, where we’re getting players from, everything else that comes along with it,” Adams said. “Funding, sponsorships, uniforms. Everything.”

School officials still plan to have a second national team and a varsity high school team to play a Washington Interscholastic Activities Association schedule next year.

“Next year we’ll have two, three teams,” Adams said. “The number of kids has just been amazing. I think, again, it kind of just validates the need and the appetite for having a prep school basketball program like this in this area.”

Limiting the number of players on the roster for this season has already presented another challenge – injuries. Adams has already lost one player to a torn ACL, and two others are nursing ankle sprains.

But one of the advantages of the prep circuit is that tomorrow’s roster might look different from today’s.

“It’s not like high school,” Adams said. “We’ll get new players in January. So, it’s just continuing to recruit, continuing to talk. There’s been so many people who have come to us, and you see the interest level from a lot of people.”

The flip side of that is the “show me” mentality.

“There’s also a lot of people that say, ‘I want to see it work for one year,’ ” Adams admitted. “By next year, when we have our sports facility and everything else, who knows? The sky will be the limit.”

However successful MODE Prep is at the Grind Session play-in event this weekend in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, will determine which of the three levels of the circuit they will be assigned to for the season.

The team Adams is taking is a bit shorthanded, but he likes his chances, starting with Alassane Doucoure, a 6-foot-10 post in the class of 2027 from Mali in West Africa.

“He’s on a exponential curve for growth as far as his game and intelligence,” Adams said. “He’s a lot of fun from a coaching standpoint. It changes a lot of tactical things that you want to do because you have that anchor behind you protecting the basket.”

There are three foreign-born players on the team, and a local flair as well – guards Collin Simon and Hudson Reid are from Coeur d’Alene. Adams has known Simon and his family for a long time, and Reid is the son of Scott Reid, MODE Prep’s director of basketball operations.

“We weren’t actively going out trying to recruit local kids,” Adams said. “And you can see from our roster that it’s from around the globe. But if a local player shows an interest and we like the kid and we like the family and he fits the mold of prep basketball, we’re not gonna say no.

“There were a lot of other local kids too, who were interested and they fit the bill. We just, again, we kind of ran out of time on multiple teams and just kind of consolidated into one.”

MODE Prep will play in several Grind Session tournaments throughout the year, along with other national prep circuit-level tourneys. They also have a series of one-off games and home-and-home series against other prep programs.

Adams described the process of scheduling – and even player acquisition – as something of a joint effort between the prep circuit coaches and administrators.

“This has been really cool being in the prep world, how a lot of the coaches – we’re almost collaborative as much as we’re competing,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, I’ve got a kid, we can’t use him this year, you might want him.’ So, it’s very collaborative in that way.”