Teen basketball is for pros

(CNN) — When King Bacot took the floor in the starting lineup for Petersburg High School in the Virginia state championship game, it was in front of a sellout crowd and his coaches sported matching burgundy suits.

King was already used to a big-time basketball atmosphere. He has multiple recruiting offers from Division 1 schools, a manager and more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. He’s received endorsement offers and has traveled all over the country for basketball tournaments, workouts and gym sessions with NBA trainers.

He’s also a 15-year-old freshman.

The last time Petersburg won a title game was 52 years ago, when reporters from all over the country marveled at their 6-foot-10, 19-year-old senior superstar named Moses Malone. After leading his team to back-to-back undefeated championship seasons, Malone upended college and pro basketball alike by taking a seven-year, $3 million deal with the Utah Stars of the American Basketball Association — making him the first modern player to jump from high school to the pros.

King is many things, at a young age, but he’s not Moses Malone. He was not even the flashiest player on his own Petersburg team — that would be senior Latrell Allmond, a McDonald’s All-American headed to Oklahoma State. In the championship game, Allmond put up 15 points, 8 rebounds and 4 blocks in a 56–35 victory over Lake Taylor. King scored only 9, while busily directing traffic and delivering the ball to his go-getting teammates. Some writeups of the game left him out entirely.

King doesn’t need to be a legend just yet. As one of the top-ranked players in the high-school class of 2029, he’s already part of a professional-style network of fame, opportunity and obligation. He arrived at Petersburg along with its new head coach, Ty White, who was not only an established championship high school coach but the head of a powerhouse AAU squad called Team Loaded, whose teen superstars joined the new program at Petersburg.

In season, King said he leaves for the gym at 6 a.m., goes to school, goes to the gym again, and then gets home again around 10 p.m. He was hosting back-to-school giveaways and signing autographs when he was in middle school. Now, he’s in negotiations to sign a paid endorsement deal with a major shoe company.

“The phone rings all the time,” said Joya Bacot, King’s mother. “It could be schools, it could be brands, it could be anybody that wants King to be a part of what they got going on.”

For a teen star like King, the chasm that Malone once had to hurdle between the Petersburg High School varsity team and professional basketball has been replaced by something more like a tricky but continuous series of conveyor belts. Players used to be required to serve long apprenticeships as amateurs before getting paid for their abilities: playing local high school and AAU ball, or possibly being recruited to a regional powerhouse private school, and then moving on to an unpaid commitment to a college program before eventually, possibly, getting drafted the NBA, or making their way to an overseas pro league.

Now, that sequence has collapsed. Over the course of the past decade, college players secured the right to receive sponsorship money, booster funds and a share of athletic revenue for themselves. At the same time, they began hopping or being pushed from school to school through the NCAA’s transfer portal en masse, following money or on-court opportunity. College basketball is a professional sport in its own right, with the best players earning seven figures.

And the level of basketball below has been transformed as well. Players still in secondary school are now potentially eligible, like college players, to sign lucrative Name, Image and Likeness sponsorship contracts. Elite or maybe-elite prospects can pursue stardom and experience in an ever-expanding array of programs: not just AAU and conventional high schools, but basketball-first prep schools and outright sports academies.

While specific rules vary by state, and not every high school can offer NIL deals, it’s become common for players to not only move high schools, but to even move from state to state, all in pursuit of the best basketball program that will offer them the most college recruiting eyes, the best facilities and the most money.

Tyran Stokes, hailed as the top prospect in the high school class of 2026, has bounced up and down the West Coast, attending three different high schools in four years, while fans on Reddit scrutinize his performance and national media agonize over his oscillating college decision. AJ Dybantsa — who finished his freshman and presumably only season at Brigham Young University scoring 35 points in a first-round NCAA tournament loss — spent his high school years going from Massachusetts to California to Utah, where he completed his senior year at Utah Prep and was reportedly paid a landmark $600,000.

King’s older brother Armando Bacot Jr. played for Trinity Episcopal in his hometown of Richmond for three years, before transferring to Florida’s IMG Academy for his final year to prepare for college. From there, he went to the University of North Carolina, where he carried the team to the national title game as a junior and then stayed around for two more years, becoming the Tar Heels’ all-time leading rebounder and collecting lavish sponsorship deals.

It’s not just about basketball anymore, said Armando Bacot Sr., King’s father. It’s about social media and marketing. Now, even high school players and their parents are free to openly pursue the business side of the game, much like Dybantsa and his family.

“I love that,” he said, speaking of Dybantsa’s landmark paycheck. “To get that money from the school, at Utah Prep.”

For those like Dybantsa, Stokes and even King, this new system in high school basketball works in their favor. They can make money, play where they want and work with whom they want. But as the high school basketball system shapeshifts, not everyone is poised to benefit.

While Dybantsa made high six figures at Utah Prep, the school itself fell behind on bills and construction projects, according to reporting by The Salt Lake Tribune; at that point, the gym was still unfinished and exposed wiring lined the weight room’s ceiling. Utah Prep did not respond to a request for comment.

Other schools appear for a year or two and suddenly dissolve, like Kanye West’s Donda Academy, whose basketball team was featured on the cover of Slam before the school fell apart in the midst of alleged health and safety violations.

“There have been some schools in the past that they play under a basketball name, like a school name, but some of them are just taking online classes,” said reporter Joseph Tipton, who covers recruiting and transfer portal news for On3. “Some of them don’t even have an actual building, or they’ll take classes at a different high school.”

Manvir Bhagrath worked at one such school, now closed, as the director of basketball operations. The business model itself is exploitive, Bhagrath said. These schools sell a dream to parents, that going to their program will give their kids opportunities or exposure they wouldn’t otherwise have, if only their parents can pay the right price. The kids whose parents can afford the tuition at these schools subsidize the more talented kids, the ones already getting buzz from college coaches.

Not every kid will make it to a Division 1 college. Even fewer will make it to the NBA. But every year, millions of dollars are spent chasing that dream, even at the expense of a consistent, regular high school education.

“I think a lot of kids are just probably not getting a proper educational foundation,” Bhagrath said. “The fact of the matter is, the large majority of kids are just not going to make it professionally. It’s just a numbers game. It’s extremely difficult to become a professional basketball player.”

Yuvraj Bimwal knows just how difficult that journey can be. At 15, fresh off winning a national championship with his club team in Australia, Bimwal wanted to take basketball more seriously. He’d always planned on moving to the US to play college ball, but his early success lit a fire beneath his basketball shoes. He made a highlight tape, wrote up a bio and with the help of AAU Australia, sent the material to high schools in the US.

Montverde Academy, which counts other international stars Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons among its alumni, was one of the schools he heard back from. Convincing his parents to let him fly across the world to play basketball at a school in Florida was no easy feat, he said, but after some family meetings and talks with the school, Bimwal packed his bags and boarded the 35-hour flight to his new home.

What he discovered upon arrival was a class divide. His room was a “jail cell,” he said, complete with a random sink in the corner and so narrow that he hit his roommate’s bedframe when getting out of bed in the mornings. And gym time was so limited that Bimwal hardly had time for extra workouts, the whole reason he’d immigrated. No way was this the same treatment a young Simmons got, Bimwal said.

“If you were on the national team, you got a house, you got access to the gym, you got treated like royalty basically,” he said. “If you weren’t on any of those teams, it was just like, ‘Thanks for checking in.’”

In a statement, Head of School Jon Hopman said Montverde is “very proud” of both the campus and the students.

“All of our boarding students, athletes or otherwise, live in one of our four dorms, eat in the same dining hall, train in the same facilities and most importantly attend the same classes and meet the same graduation requirements,” Hopman said.

Bimwal transferred after a year, moving to a public high school in Kentucky that he preferred not to name. There he became a top-35 player in the state, but when he went to apply for a driver’s license, he discovered that the school hadn’t extended his visa and it was about to lapse, he said. He had to go back to Australia before he could return to the US to finish his high school career in Ohio.

Now 20 years old, Bimwal is a freshman at Dalton State in north Georgia. He plans on transferring to a D1 program eventually, and then, finally, hopefully, reaching his dream: playing in the NBA.

But the entire process is just “the dance you have to do” for a shot at playing professional basketball, said Gurmeher Bimwal, Yuvraj Bimwal’s older brother, who moved to the US later to accompany him.

“You have to go through the system, no matter how broken that system is,” he said. “Having moved to the US a couple of years ago now, there’s a lot of institutionalized issues that exist here anyway. The high school sports system is just one example of that.”

Bimwal and King’s journeys are different, but they share one commonality: They are both making big career decisions at an age when most kids are thinking about prom or the SATs.

Is that fair? One of King’s best friends died last summer, when a gun went off at another friend’s home. He was a bit younger than King, but the two were both basketball players, dreaming of one day squaring off in the NBA.

Armando Sr., remembers it like this: They buried the friend on Tuesday. On Friday, King was on a plane to California for a basketball camp.

Armando Sr. realized he’d made a mistake and apologized to King later. But the entire incident shows just how much pressure is on these teenagers playing at this level. With the high school season over and the state championship in hand, King is getting ready for Team Loaded games to start up in April and to continue into August.

Sometimes Joya wonders if it’s all too much for her son. She’s said as much to trainers, King’s manager and her husband. King’s tired. Like any teenager, he needs a break, a day off, some rest.

Eventually, she said, she learned to back down. “Everybody in the world that plays basketball is doing the same thing.”

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