Link Academy set out to be the ‘IMG of the Midwest.’ Is the upstart national prep basketball power ahead of schedule?
HILLSBORO, Ore. — Trey Green and his teammates lingered.
It was late December, and Link Academy had just swept its way to a Les Schwab Invitational win in the suburbs of Portland, Ore. Lions players hung around on the court after the award celebration to sign autographs and take selfies with eager kids.
For Green, the moment felt surreal. Certainly more than he envisioned when he left North Carolina’s Lake Norman Christian for Branson, Mo. to play his last two high school seasons at an upstart prep power with lofty aspirations.
“It feels like we rock stars, man,” Green, a consensus four-star prospect with offers from Virginia Tech, Xavier and Clemson among others, said.
The postgame scene was a snapshot of life at Link Academy for Green and his teammates, a newly assembled stockpile of mostly high-major college talent flying around the country playing a national schedule.
The No. 5 ranked team in SBLive/Sports Illustrated’s Power 25 has been an immediate success as the “new kids on the block” at a time when the upper-echelon of national high school basketball is consolidating with the emergence of the National Interscholastic Basketball Conference, which just completed its first full regular season.
RELATED: SBLive/Sports Illustrated's Power 25 national rankings
Link Academy feels it's on the outside looking in. For now.
The boarding school located on the campus of Camp Kanakuk has Missouri State High School Activities Association affiliation, and its first-year national team plays a national schedule, traveling to showcases and tournaments from coast to coast.
The national team is the latest expansion of the religious-based basketball academy. It’s all part of a greater effort by founder Adam Donyes to build the “IMG Academy of the Midwest” in the Ozarks.
Link Year Prep’s regional and national postgraduate teams have produced 32 active NCAA Division I players and several pros, including former SEC player of the year and Lakers guard Mason Jones.
After hiring a coach in Rodney Perry who Donyes believed big name prospects would choose to uproot and play for over a more established power, and at a time when elite high school talent have options to make six-figure salaries by going pro, Link Academy built its roster within a span of months, including two 2022 McDonald’s All-Americans.
The Lions (26-0) are piecing together a compelling resume for the GEICO Nationals, the most visible culminating high school basketball event in the country, and could even make a case for the No. 1 overall seed with a win over No. 1 Sunrise Christian Academy, the NIBC champs, on Friday at the Heartland Hoops Classic in Nebraska.
First, the roster construction in its inaugural season turned heads.
Now, the Lions are backing it up on the court — surpassing even Donyes' own expectations.
“I thought maybe in two or three years, we’d be doing what we’re doing now,” Donyes, who played basketball at Boise State, said.
But ask players and coaches, and they’ll say they are right on schedule.
Link coach Rodney Perry cases the sidelines in the Les Schwab Invitational. (Photo by Taylor Balkom)
When asked what compelled them to move to Branson, Mo. and play for Link Academy over their hometown high schools or even other national prep powers, players echoed a similar tune.
“I really came for the coaching,” Green said.
Perry is a longtime AAU and Division I college assistant coach, most recently at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who has been credited with helping develop nine active NBA players, including Trae Young and Michael Porter Jr. He was the head 17u coach for Mokan Elite of the Nike EYBL, regarded as the country’s top shoe brand club circuit.
Donyes tapped him as the head coach and put him in charge of assembling a roster.
His pitch was simple: Come for a college-like grind, compete among the country’s best and leave a mark on something new, something different.
“Anybody can go to the powerhouses and be the next ‘guy,’ ” Perry said. “It’s different when you go to a place that is starting up, now it’s your legacy. You get a chance to be the first to ever do it.”
Perry wasn’t just looking for the best talent. He needed the right pieces.
It would only work, Perry said, if players — all who are the best, or among the best, prospects in their home states — were willing to accept a role and be open to accountability.
“We had to have guys who were going to be team-first guys,” Perry said. “A lot of times when you get a lot of talent, it ends up being a situation where they play for themselves rather than for the team.”
The first few were familiar.
Michigan signee Tarris Reed Jr., the reigning St. Louis Post-Dispatch All-Metro boys basketball player of the year and the No. 35-ranked senior in Sports Illustrated’s SI99, transferred from Chaminade in St. Louis. Ohio State-bound Felix Okpara (No. 55) came over from Hamilton Heights Academy in Chattanooga, Tenn., senior guard Damien Mayo, a three-star prospect per 247 Sports, came over from Chaminade, and junior forward Omaha Beliew, widely seen as a top 10 junior in the country, joined in August after initially leaving Iowa’s Waukee High School for Montverde Academy in June.
All played for Perry at Mokan Elite.
Bryson Warren, who also played on Mokan Elite, transferred from Little Rock Central (Ark.) over the summer, but left for Overtime Elite in the fall, an upstart professional league that pays high school-aged prospects.
As the 2021-22 school year started, the roster was already in motion. But Perry wasn't done. He had two soon-to-be McDonald's All-Americans to land.
The toughest player to land was LSU commit Julian Phillips. The 6-foot-8 forward and consensus five-star prospect said no “four or five times” before deciding to leave Blythewood in Columbia, S.C. in September.
The final piece was Jordan Walsh, a five-star Arkansas commit. Walsh started at Oak Cliff Faith Family in Dallas, Tex. and transferred briefly to SoCal Academy, a California prep school, before joining Link Academy in September. He committed to Perry without ever taking a visit.
Both Walsh and Phillips bought into Perry's vision and felt the move would best prepare them to contribute immediately next year in college.
Walsh said as a late addition, the adjustment to an already star-laden team was made easier by how close the group was already.
“It’s a lot of sacrifice involved when you come to prep school and play with great guys,” Walsh said. “I can’t go out and get 20 or 30 (points) a night. There are other scorers who are maybe even better scorers than me who I need to get the ball to.”
Added Phillips: “All of us were the guys at our old school. When you’ve got a team full of great guys, everybody has to do their role well. He calls it ‘doing our job.’ ”
Arkansas commit Jordan Walsh, a 2022 McDonald's All-American, is announced in the starting lineup in the Les Schwab Invitational in late December. (Photo by Taylor Balkom)
More than a dozen lanky teenagers piled into a bunk room at a campground a reasonable drive away from Link Academy’s Branson campus.
Phones were confiscated, and the players embarked on a retreat they say bonded them like a family. At night, they talked, joked and laughed into the early morning. Green smiled as he recounted seeing the 6-foot-11 Okpara and 6-10 Reed Jr.’s legs dangling off of the end of their twin beds.
“Those were some of the deepest conversations we’ve had,” Green said. “It’s 3 a.m. and we’re arguing about who the best rapper is, the best NBA team.”
Led by Perry, they underwent several days worth of team-bonding activities aimed at bringing them closer, like a ropes course, football, tennis and video games.
Bonds were strengthened. Trust was built.
“I felt it brought us closer together and made our bond stronger,” Reed Jr. said. “That helped us come together for the season.”
“It was over after that,” Green said.
Weeks later, Link Academy started its season with a collective goal of backing up its much-hyped summer. Players consider each trip around the country another opportunity to introduce themselves, one city at a time.
Reed Jr. feels it when he’s in a new city and hears people ask who Link is.
He felt it on the team’s trips to Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina and Las Vegas, then again in Portland.
After several national teams and local powers backed out of the Les Schwab Invitational in late December at the last second due to COVID-19 and weather-related issues, Link became the main attraction, filling the gym at Liberty High School each night, capped with its closest game of the tournament — a 23-point win over Oregon 6A favorite Tualatin.
Eventually, Donyes hopes Link Academy will offer more than just basketball like Florida’s IMG Academy, an elite sports training boarding school that started as a tennis academy and now hosts some of the nation’s top football and basketball teams.
"We're basically in the process of securing the rest of the funds of building an IMG of the Midwest, if you will," Donyes said.
They took the next step Wednesday when the school announced the hiring of former Phoenix Mercury interim head coach Russ Pennell to lead a forthcoming girls national postgrad team.
For now, a group of 16 through 18 year olds are out to prove something.
“People don’t give us our respect,” Reed Jr. said, “so we’re coming out and trying to win the respect and get as many wins as possible.”
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(Lead photo by Leon Neuschwander)
