* * Visiting Oak Hill Academy

Sorry for my tardiness with my regular Monday posts.  Yesterday, I had a delightful visit at the Oak Hill Academy in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia.

This small private high school with an enrollment of just over 150 kids has become a legendary basketball powerhouse.  Coach Steve Smith, a mid-50s man with a grizzled face who looks like he has spent lots of time asking a really tall young people to do what he wants them to do, sat in his nice wood-paneled office surrounded by trophies and sports mementos.  We had a leisurely, rambling conversation about life in a very small community and about basketball supremacy.  In the 25 years that he has coached at Oak Hill, his team has been rated either Number 1 or Number 2 in the nation.  He has coached Carmello Anthony, Kevin Durant, Stephen Jackson, Rajon Rondo, Josh Smith and Jerry Stackhouse and many other current NBA stars.

I also spoke with his wife Lisa who works as a secretary to the principal and with the president of the institution.  This is an almost exclusive exclusively on-campus institution with three boys dormitories and one girls dormitory.  Between the players, the trainers and assistants, and the cheerleaders, almost 20% of the entire student body participates in basketball.  But beyond that, they have an amazing international diversity of students, many from Korea, Japan, and Africa.

Steve told me that routinely six or seven of his players on each team will eventually play him for a Division I intercollegiate basketball program.  I was thinking how unusual it would be for any player at my local home high schools to play Division I basketball.  Even Coach Smith's nonstarters play Division I basketball.

I was introduced to three players and I had a chance to talk with each.  One was an inner-city black kid from Los Angeles who was the team's point guard.  A second was the son of Grammy award-winning musician Bruce Hornsby.  The third was almost 7 feet tall, a kid from Senegal, West Africa who was also the student body president.  Each of them expressed a high level of satisfaction with and affection for Oak Hill Academy.

Coach Smith told me that his program was known throughout the country but in many cases was better known in places distant from here.  He told me that if he played a local team in Roanoke or Greensboro, attendance would likely be perhaps 2000 people whereas if he played a team in Los Angeles, it was common for 8000 people to attend.  He said he never did any recruiting.  His phone rings all the time with prospective players wanting to come to school at Oak Hill.  One player he turned down was Kevin Garnet who now is a start with the Boston Celtics.

This hidden gem is one of the many stories I plan to tell in my upcoming book, Harmonic Highways, Motorcycling Virginia's Crooked Road.