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COLORADO SPRINGS – The USA Basketball National Junior Men’s team minicamp was an ideal showcase for some of the very best in the high school classes of 2018-20, roughly six weeks before the start of the “real” season.

Saturday and Sunday’s drills and scrimmages produced multiple standouts, relative to consistency of effort and production, and improvement (since the last time I watched them play, mostly in the spring or summer).

My choice as the best player from the Class of 2018 at the event was – no surprise – Zion Williamson, who was measured at 6-foot-5 (without shoes) and weighed in at 272 pounds.

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COLORADO SPRINGS – Eighteen members of the Class of 2018 are among the 54 players on hand for the two-day, USA Basketball Men’s Junior National Team “mini-camp”.

For those seniors, it’s another opportunity to pad their resume in order to get a spot on the USA squad that will play in the Nike Hoop Summit Game in Portland in April.

And, with multiple Selection Committee voters (myself included) on hand, it’s also another way to build their cases for inclusion on the McDonald’s All-American team that will be unveiled in mid-January.

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CULVER CITY, Ca. – The First-ever “Ryse Up Fall Classic”, in honor of the late basketball star Ryse Williams, is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday at Culver City High.

Williams, a four-year varsity letterman at Redondo High, died from the effects of an extremely rare form of cancer on June 22 – a day before he and the rest of the Redondo senior class were scheduled to go through graduation ceremonies.

The 6-foot-3 Williams was a two-time all-CIF Southern Section selection and had signed a national letter of intent last November to attend Loyola Marymount University as a member of its basketball program.

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Many of the very best high school programs from Southern California will be taking part in the “Hoops for Houston” event to be held Saturday and Sunday at Culver City and Pasadena Maranatha high schools.

Thirty-four different teams will play a collective 21 games, eight each at Culver City and Maranatha on Saturday and five at Maranatha on Sunday.

All the proceeds from the paid admissions ($10 daily) will go to Miller Intermediate School in Houston, whose students and their families were among those devastated by the impact of Hurricane Harvey.

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FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Ca. – The first-ever PrepHoops So-Cal Top 250 Expo was held Sunday afternoon at Fountain Valley High.

There were approximately 80 players on hand.

But what the event might have lacked in quanity was more than made up for by way of the quality of players and instructors on hand.

Players got in nearly two hours of exceptional teaching from Clint Parks, Kris Johnson, Aaron Wright, Dominique Dunning, A.J. Gaspora and D’Cean Bryant (the coach at the host school).

Collectively, there isn’t a better group of “skills instructors” to be found anywhere.

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