SoCalHoops Recruiting News

Valley Area Players At The
Big Time: Only Two?--(Aug. 5, 1999)

We read with interest an article by Mike Bresnahan of the Los Angeles Times Valley Edition, published yesterday, detailing the exploits and recruitment of a couple of Valley area players, Branduinn Fullove (6'-5" Sr. SG/SF) and Dustin Villapigue (6'-9" Jr. PF) both from Simi Valley.

Both Fullove and Villapigue played this summer for Pump N Run Gold in Las Vegas at the 256 team adidas Big Time,  and then at the 96 team adidas Double Pump Best of Summer Tournament at Cal State Dominguez Hills, the two largest tournaments of the summer.  While the article also had a couple of paragraphs focusing on Todd Tomlinson (6'-1" Sr. SG) from Moorpark, who played this summer at the Slam N Jam NIT and at the smaller 33 team ARC-Slam N Jam Las Vegas "Grand Finale" last week, the real theme of the story, which  was entitled "The Club Scene"  was about the players who had increased their recruiting by playing well in the Las Vegas tournaments. 

But this got us to thinking?  Were there really only two players from the entire Valley area who played at the Big Time Tournament that were worthy of space in the Times?  Well, recognizing that newspapers are creatures of limited depth and limited space, the article got us thinking about who, besides the two from Simi Valley, had actually participated in the Las Vegas adidas Big Time Tournament who live in the Simi-SF Valley region, an area which has produced some pretty good Division I talent in recent years, including guys like Gilbert Arenas (6'-4" Fr. SG/PG) from Grant High (Arizona), Kent Dennis (6'-3" SG) of Cleveland (West Virginia), and Ruben Douglas (6'-5" So.SG) of Bell-Jeff (Arizona).

So we decided to really find out.  We first started with the rosters for the Big Time Tournament, and then we went to our notes for additional players who might not have made the rosters.  Here's what we discovered: 

There were 256 teams in the adidas Las Vegas Big Time Tournament.  With an average of 12 players per roster (which is about what each teams carried from a cursory review, and not trying to be mathmatically correct) there were about 3,000 players overall. 

There were club traveling teams from 40 different States, two teams from Canada, and one team of International players from Europe.  There were more than 300 Division I coaches who attended,  and countless other Division II and III schools who scouted and recruited the players.  The tournament was played at 8 different gyms on 16 different courts, all running games simultaneously from 8:00 a.m. until after midnight for 5 solid days. 

This truly was the "Big Time."  And contrary to the Times article (no offense intended to Mike Bresnahan, who actually took the time and effort to at least write about club hoops during the summer, which is more than most of the other writers at the Times did. . well, except Eric Sondheimer, and that was just to knock the club scene with an article in late June about how good and wise Scott whatshisname was from that school in the West Hills area for refusing to play club ball in any tournaments. . . now what was that kid's name anyway???), there were more than two players in attendance worthy of note.  

So how many players from the Valley region actually participated in the Big Time Tournament?  By our count, there were  29 players from the Valley area or schools in the surrounding region who actually played in the event, and three on rosters who didn't play due to injuries.  There were only four on the two Pump N Run teams combined (Branduinn Fullove, Dustin Villapigue, David Gale, and Greg Guenther);  only one on Rockfish's No. 1 team (Russell Lakey of Harvard-Westlake) and handful of others scattered on the other Rockfish teams. And interestingly, there were only two teams overall which were made up of predominantly Valley-based players in the entire tournament and both of them were ARC teams:   (ARC-Burbank, and ARC-Team Dynamo).  

Of the 31 players, only 3 were "rising" sophomores (David Gale, Will Sheslow, and Jonathon Todd), 13 were "rising" juniors (Dustin Villapigue, Frank Reed, Adam Allegro, Andrew Moore,   Mike Luderer, Keith Jarbo, Brandon Duplessie, Cody Pearson, Ruben Sanchez, Casey Markovic, Shaun Michel, Ellis Walker, TJ Stephens) and the rest, another 12,  were "rising" seniors (Branduinn Fullove, Carlos Arroyo, Greg Guenther, Eric Geffner, Damian Jordan, Tyler Newton, Matt Biernat, Jesse Foster, Zach Smith, Ron Ruffin, Josiah Johnson, and Russell Lakey). 

Another interesting stat:  Among the 12 rising senior players from the region who played, perhaps 5 of them are considered to be at least potential mid-major Division I recruits:  Fullove, Guenther, Ruffin, Johnson and Lakey. Two are top 200 players in the entire country: Fullove and Lakey.   Perhaps Brett Michel might also be listed here, but sadly, he didn't play due to injury.  While most of these guys had varying degrees of success on the court, only Russell Lakey was selected to the Big Time All-Tournament Team.

Area high schools represented in the tournament were:   Buckley, Montclair Prep, Chaminade, Agoura, Simi Valley, Hart, Notre Dame, Crespi, Burbank Burroughs, Cleveland, Burbank, Harvard-Westlake,  Bell-Jeff, Chatsworth,   LA Baptist and Oak Park.  Six different club travel teams/organizations were represented, including Pump N Run, Belmont Shore, ARC, Branch West,  and Rockfish.  

Here's the list of players, alphabetically organized by class, school and club team:

Three other top area players who were listed on rosters didn't play because of injuries:  Brett Michel (6'-6" Sr. SG/SF) from Simi Valley had perhaps the worst summer of any of the three as he had to miss ABCD camp and all the summer tournaments with a broken foot in a cast.  Andrew Bloomfield,   (6'-2" Sr. SG) LA Baptist (Monsters of Midway) was injured just before the Big Time and didn't play,  and Adam Drell (6'-7" Sr. PF) Chatsworth (Monsters of Midway), also missed all of the summer tournaments and camps while recovering from minor back surgery to correct a compressed disc. 

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