The Courier-Journal

Louisville, Kentucky

27 December 2003

Oak Hill has sent 18 to NBA, won four national crowns 
But it's not all fun, games at small Virginia school 


By C. RAY HALL
chall@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

PHOTOS BY NINA GREIPEL, THE C-J

Assistant coach Charles Hollaway took a shot in Oak Hill's surprisingly small gymnasium, where the college jerseys of several of the school's alumni hang.

Oak Hill Academy, a school of 120 students in grades 8-12, is located in Mouth of Wilson, Va.

MOUTH OF WILSON, Va. — To get to Oak Hill Academy, the gold standard of high school basketball, you take the Jeb Stuart Highway. This may explain why Confederate flags are more popular lawn ornaments than, say, basketball hoops.

The mountains are occasionally deep green and aromatic, thanks to Christmas tree farms. Some of the hillsides are so steep you wonder how the grazing cattle keep from toppling over.

You go through Volney, home of Ona's country restaurant. Then, without warning, there's a low-slung red-brick post office and, just beyond, a modest sign that announces Oak Hill Academy.

The sign tells you that Oak Hill is a Baptist boarding school founded in 1878. There is no mention of basketball. Nor of Carmelo Anthony, Jerry Stackhouse, Rod Strickland, Ron Mercer or the 14 other Oak Hill players who took their game to the National Basketball Association.

There's no mention of the school's four national championships and four runner-up finishes in the past 13 years. No sign that Oak Hill is ranked No. 1 in the country again this season in the USA Today poll. No sign that Mouth of Wilson — named for Wilson Creek — has much to high-five about at all.

"It's a wonderful place to live," said Rex Halsey, who has a feed-and-fertilizer business down the road. "Not the best place in the world to make money, but it is a good place to live and raise your family."

Halsey graduated from Oak Hill in 1955, when it offered grades 1-11 and had a mix of private- and public-school students. Now it's a boarding school with 120 students (69 boys, 51 girls) in grades 8-12. And it's a pricey proposition to go there — around $20,000 a year. About a third of the students get financial aid, mainly in reduced tuition. Some basketball players get scholarships, which still don't cover all expenses. The star on this year's team, Josh Smith, pays $2,400 to attend.

"It's out in the middle of nowhere, but it's a great situation for kids to grow and mature," said Smith's father, Walter. "My son has really matured and picked up his grades a whole lot, because when you're out here like this, it's like all you have to do is study, study, study. And study. And then play basketball."

When Halsey went to Oak Hill in the 1950s, there was no basketball. Only baseball and football. Touch football. Eventually, a basketball program came along, aiming low and hitting the mark. Then 30 years ago, everything changed.

Steve Smith, a 48-year-old Kentuckian, is in his 19th season as coach. He grew up in Wilmore and went to college at Asbury, where his father, Winston, taught biology 30 years. Another Asbury graduate, Larry Davis, coached Oak Hill in the early '80s. He persuaded Smith to leave the banking business in Lexington and become his assistant coach in 1983. When Davis left two years later, Smith became the head coach. He explains how a quiet little Baptist boarding school became a basketball heavyweight.

"You look in the annual and it's like 1971, they're 3-20," Smith said. "Nineteen-seventy-two they're 6-17 or whatever, and you get about 1974 and it goes 27-3 right away."

This transformation came under Robert Isner, the school's president from 1965-86. His son Chuck was the basketball coach in the 1970s, toiling in a tiny gym that had a tile floor. Smith tells the story he heard from the president.

"He said his son came in and said, `We're struggling with students, the school's struggling. We need to get the name of the school out there. Football's too expensive. What about upgrading the basketball team?' Smith said.

"He was tired of getting beat up on. And apparently he just, off he went to New York and came back with four players, and they went 27-3 and it snowballed after that."

Smith said he doesn't have to recruit players anymore. They come to him.

"I just pick up the phone," he said.

THERE ARE 12 players on this season's Gold Team, the elite touring squad that is 16-0 and ranked No. 1 in the country. Only one, Anthony Wright, is from Virginia. Point guard Rajon Rondo is from Louisville. Center Brian Johnson, who signed with the University of Louisville, is from suburban Washington, D.C. Forward Dayshawn Wright has committed to his hometown school, Syracuse.

Forward Josh Smith, an Indiana University signee who attracts pro scouts to every game, is from Marietta, Ga. (When Smith recently left a game with five minutes to go, Miami Heat general manager Randy Pfund left the building.)

There are no New York City guys, and there haven't been any for several years.

"We used to have a lot of kids from New York," Steve Smith said. "They would come here to get out of the city. ... But New York City kids, it's tough to survive here."

It probably would challenge any American teenager to thrive in this place that seems most hospitable to cows, Christmas trees and country music.

(Derek Anderson, a 15-year-old sophomore guard on the junior-varsity team, doesn't listen to the radio. "I just ask my dad to send me CDs," he said. His dad is Derek Anderson of the Portland Trail Blazers.)

"The parents love our rural environment," school president Michael Groves said. "There's no malls here. We are 35 miles from the closest McDonald's."

Oak Hill isn't just a career stop for upwardly mobile basketball players. It's also a place for underachieving, unhappy students who need a change from the attractions and distractions in their hometowns. Occasionally, it can be a last-chance school.

"For some, it is," said Rev. Douglas Turnmire, the campus minister. "Their parents — not all, but some — have reached their wits' end. To send your kid off to boarding school in an isolated area has got to be tough."

The isolation is only part of the rigors of life at Oak Hill. Students are forbidden to have cars or cell phones. They wear uniforms to class. They can have personal computers but not personal Internet connections. They go to school on Saturdays. They have mandatory study hall at night. They can't leave campus unless they're accompanied by a staff member. They're required to attend Sunday worship services at Young's Chapel, a white wooden church on campus. They also must attend basketball games, in uniform. There are chaperoned weekend socials, with rules that forbid such things as "sitting in laps and making out." Drugs mean automatic expulsion. So does "creeping" — sneaking into an opposite-sex dorm. This is not a place where rebelliousness is encouraged.

"A male student who wants to come here and wear earrings, that's not ever going to happen," Groves said. "They give up a lot of freedom. We search luggage when they come in. ... We're going to check their rooms, and we're going to make sure they go to bed, make sure they get up in the mornings. The students here feel like we hover — and we do."

OAK HILL looks like a very small college. Most of its 22 teachers live on campus. Smith, the basketball coach, lives 90 paces from the gym. It's not unusual, he said, for his players to drop by to watch a game or eat brownies. Face time with faculty isn't always welcome, though.

"You have a low ratio of students to teachers, and they get a lot of individual attention — sometimes to their chagrin," Turnmire said, "because they're used to ... just sliding by. It's not uncommon for me to go to a dorm and say, `You owe me work. Where's my work?' And that's true of every student here, be they basketball player or not."

Turnmire left the North Carolina Highway Patrol academy to study at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. He worked his way through school by being a handyman and groundskeeper at Locust Grove. He helps the maintenance crew at Oak Hill, in addition to teaching three religion classes and being pastor at Young's Chapel.

Such double and triple duty is common at the school. Groves was dean of students and director of admissions four years. He kept those jobs when he became president in 2002. Groves, 42, is a West Virginia native who earned his master's and doctorate from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He spends a lot of time telling people what Oak Hill is not. It is not a rich school with an airplane to ferry the players to the West Coast. It is not a postgraduate school where kids can go for a fifth year of high school.

He insists that basketball is not the tail wagging the dog at Oak Hill.

"It (basketball) is of benefit to the school. It does not contradict the mission of the school," he said. "Josh Smith is better off being here than he would be at a public school. Carmelo Anthony was better off being here. Cliff Hawkins would probably not be a starting point guard at the University of Kentucky had he not been at Oak Hill Academy for his junior and senior years and been pushed academically and been made to wear school dress."

Groves describes the place as a "dichotomy."

"Most of our students are from the city or the suburbs, and we're a very, very rural place," he said. "None of our students are from here, yet they all live here. We live in a community that's predominantly white. Forty-three percent of our students are African-American or international."

Most of the students come from middle-class or upper-middle-class families with college-educated parents. Not so for their neighbors along the Virginia-North Carolina border.

"This is a great place," Groves said. "But it is a unique place. And it's unique for Josh Smith and Carmelo Anthony and players like that, who are going to play in the NBA, to have sat right up here in this church, with Lane and Zane Phipps, the dairy farmers from down the road."

Lane Phipps leads the church singing, so he sits on the front pew. That's how he got to know DeSagana Diop, the only player to go directly from Oak Hill to the NBA.

"He sat in the front pew with me, his legs were so long," Phipps said.

"In the beginning of the year, sometimes it's a service you recognize that they are being made to come to, but a lot of them look forward to it later on. I think it grows on them.

"We had a community-church softball team one year, and Jerry Stackhouse played with us some."

Stackhouse played for the basketball team that Smith regards as Oak Hill's best — the 1992-93 squad that went 36-0. Stackhouse's teammates included Alex Sanders, who went to Louisville, and two players who followed him to North Carolina — Jeff McInnis and Makhtar Ndiaye. That team filled Oak Hill's little gym to overflowing.

"The gym holds about 400," Smith said. "We've had as many as 900 in there, standing everywhere. Every game you would come to, that gym would be all Carolina-blue shirts. ... (Stackhouse) was the biggest draw we've ever had."

The fans would stand in the narrow hallway, peering through the doors, or retreat to classrooms to watch on closed-circuit television.

FIRST-TIME visitors to Oak Hill might be forgiven if they assume they've mistakenly wandered into the practice gym. The tile floor is long gone, replaced by wood so shiny that it looks liquid. But there are only five rows of metal bleachers, on one side.

"They think that our gym has to be the mecca of high school basketball," Groves said of the uninitiated. "It's not. Now, do I wish that a lot of our players would get together and build us a new gym? Absolutely. Do I think they should? Yes. Eighteen players who have played in the NBA. If all of our graduates tithed 1 percent of their salary in one year, I could build it."

Oak Hill rarely plays a home game. It has up to 38 games this season, with only eight in its little hilltop gym, which is decorated with championship banners and jerseys representing the colleges where Oak Hill alums have played. But few opposing teams ever see this gym.

"It's hard to get people to come to Mouth of Wilson and play," Steve Smith said. "The odds of winning are not good."

Oak Hill has lost one home game in 20 years. But then, the odds of beating Oak Hill anywhere are not good. Smith's 19-year record is 548-36.

This weekend, Oak Hill is playing in Raleigh, N.C. Two weekends ago the team played in the Kentucky towns of Hazard and Lick Creek.

Last weekend it played four games in Hawaii, winning the Iolani Prep Classic. Rondo, a senior guard, was tournament MVP with 25 points and 10 assists in the championship game against Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Josh Smith, a muscular forward with a silky shooting touch and an explosive presence around the basket, incites crowds everywhere he goes. Even as Hazard fans watched their team fall behind 78-22 in the third quarter, they couldn't help but cheer as Smith threw down dunk after dunk.

"That one will be on `SportsCenter,'" one fan exclaimed. "His elbow was this far down in the basket!"

After the 87-39 defeat, the Hazard team lined up to shake hands with the Warriors. Then something unprecedented happened. The Hazard cheerleaders poured onto the court to join the conga line of hand-shakers.

"They're all going to be in the NBA someday," said Amber Hammonds, a junior cheerleader. "So we thought we should shake their hands."

Then little kids poured out of the stands to get in line to shake hands and hang around to collect autographs.

Johnson inked his name on cap bills and dollar bills. He looked up a moment to watch his teammates doing the same. He yelled "Rajon!" and shook his head, smiling.

"We get the attention everywhere we go," Johnson said later on the team bus.

THE HAZARD fans got an extra ration of Smith's alley-oop dunks. But they missed his best move of the season — which came after a game.

Three Saturdays ago Oak Hill faced Jackson (Miss.) Lanier in the finale of the 15-game Marshall County Hoop Fest in Draffenville, Ky. Oak Hill led by 16 at the half but found unfamiliar trouble later, thanks to an inspired performance by Lanier's Monta Ellis, who scored 40 points.

Things got scary when Rondo fouled out midway through the fourth quarter.

"We have to have Rajon," Steve Smith said. "When Rajon comes out, our team doesn't play that well."

He fretted about Ellis, who was shredding Oak Hill's press and tossing in shot after shot.

"I thought, `This guy might make a three and win the game at the buzzer,'" the coach said.

But the 6-8 Smith helped with ballhandling, and Oak Hill held on to win 80-75. Smith finished with 31 points and eight rebounds to win game MVP honors. Tournament officials summoned Smith to receive the award. As flash bulbs blinked, Smith motioned toward the Lanier bench, waving Ellis to the spotlight.

In the stands, Smith's father said to a neighbor, "He's going to give that kid the trophy. I can feel it. I can see it all over him."

And his son did give the award to his opponent.

"He deserved it more than I did," Josh Smith explained.

A few nights later, Josh's father stood in the chilly dark outside the Oak Hill gym, recalling the moment.

"We try to teach our kids not to be caught up in materialism," Walter Smith said. "The quality of a man is an outward expression of what he does, and that was a great thing that he did. ... Chills went all over my body."