Looking Past The Sleaze Of High School Hoops
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NBA All-Star and Montrose Christian School alumn Kevin Durant
By DERON SNYDER
It’s easy to be jaded and cynical and skeptical about the merits of big-time youth basketball, in which teenagers fly around the nation, play on national TV and grace magazine covers.
It’s easy to surmise that the attention is excessive and premature, contributing to larger problems in college and beyond because it puts teens on pedestals and instills a sense of entitlement, merely because they’re good ballplayers.
But it’s harder to reach those conclusions once you learn about some of the players or watch a documentary like “Prayer For a Perfect Season,” which debuts Tuesday on HBO.
This exceptional, behind-the-scenes look at an elite-level prep program provides much more than the sliver of sports — the actual games — we’re accustomed to watching.
“Prayer” clothes the players and coaches in humanity we typically forget when discussing rankings, records and statistics. Though it chronicles the 2010-11 season of St. Patrick High, the Elizabeth, N.J., school that finished No. 2 in the USA Today Top 25, the documentary details storylines undoubtedly found at other national powerhouses.
