LA GRANGE, IL – Six-foot-eleven Baye Fall had a couple of quality opportunities Saturday to make an on-case statement as to why his supporters can claim he’s the No. 1 prospect in high school basketball’s national Class of 2023.
And he certainly made the most of both of them.
Fall (pictured) stood out – both literally and figuratively – among the 240 players who took part in the first day of the annual Pangos All-Midwest Frosh/Soph Camp at the Park District sports facility in this Chicago suburb.
Fall (who immigrated to the U.S. from Senegal in 2018 and attends Lutheran High in the Denver suburb of Denver), playing for the “Minnesota” squad, faced two significant tests in his two camp games Saturday.
He aced them both.
While often matched against two other candidates for Top 10 status in the national sophomore class, 6-7 Jalen Hooks (Indianapolis Crispus Attucks), for “Nebraska”, and 6-8 J.J. Taylor (Chicago Kenwood Academy), for “DePaul”, Fall consistently showed off his bounce and quickness to the rim and ball as a rebounder, scorer and shot blocker.
His effort on Saturday came roughly 19 months after he first burst onto the national “grassroots” hoop scene as an eighth grader during another Pangos/Dinos Trigonis-fronted event, the Pangos Junior All-American Camp at Cerritos College in Norwalk in Southern California.
In the “Best of the Best” all-star game that capped that event, Fall went for 13 points and 14 rebounds while blocking six shot attempts – and “altering” countless others.
Another standout in that March 3, 2019 contest was guard Jeremiah Johnson, then an eighth grader at Eric Charter School in Oklahoma City.
Johnson is now a sophomore at Putnam City North High in Oklahoma City and he showed Saturday (during two games for “Wisconsin”) that he has been on the same progress track that Fall has traveled on since that weekend in Southern California.
The 6-3 Johnson (like Taylor, a Top 30 All-Star Game selection here a year ago as a freshman), was rising up and banging in jump shots a la Donovan Mitchell or Jamal Murray while scoring 24 points in his first game Saturday.
Among some of the other sophomore standouts Saturday were 6-7 JaQualon Roberts (Bloomington, IN, North) and 6-1 Malik Olafioye (Ecorse High in Michigan, about eight miles north of Detroit), each of whom rivaled Johnson among the best scorers I saw Saturday).
Action resumes Sunday morning with each of the 24 camp teams playing once, beginning at 8:15 (CT).
The Top 60 and Top 30 all-star clashes are set to tip off at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m., respectively.
All of the action is live-streamed and archived by BallerTV.
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