When I was growing up playing travel basketball for the city of Newton, my coaches always passed along the same message: You’ll be playing with this group of guys until you graduate from high school, so get to know them and learn to play with them.
As kids in elementary and middle school, we watched Newton North High School basketball games together as a team, and I remember feeling inspired that the players we watched — who advanced several rounds into the playoffs every year — had once been part of a travel team just like me.
In the winter of my freshman year, I made varsity at Newton South High School with some of my friends from the travel team. We were crap that year, improving to slightly less crappy the next, but by our junior year, we had one of the best seasons in school history, winning the league and ranking 10th in the state. We had high hopes for the next season.
But that spring, five of my teammates moved to private schools with renowned athletic programs. Soon our coach left for one, too. My senior season was a letdown. In three years, I lost eight teammates — most of whom I’d played with since fourth grade — to what is known as “reclassing.”
Reclassing — in which student athletes repeat a grade to gain a competitive edge, almost always switching to private schools in the process — is on the rise. The press ties the practice to the pursuit of top college programs and sponsorship money. But what the coverage misses is how public school programs and the students left behind are hurt by increasingly privatized sports.
Twenty years ago, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, or MIAA, which is made up of all the public schools and some private schools in Massachusetts, was sending basketball players to Division 1 programs including Harvard, Wake Forest, and Boston University. And 30 years before that, future Hall of Fame NBA player Patrick Ewing was finishing up his senior season at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a school in my league.
This year, the MIAA did not send a single player to a Division 1 school. Instead, most of the talent has been sucked up by New England private schools. A few of the top MIAA players are going to Division 3, and most public school basketball programs would be thrilled to keep a future college athlete for all four years. While there isn’t much data on public-to-private school transferring or reclassing, the overall trend is clear: High school athletes are increasingly aiming to improve their chances of getting into a top college program by leaping to private schools.
Private school reclassing has a cascading effect. When one athlete transfers, more are likely to follow. The team they leave behind is worse, and once one talented student transfers, others feel empowered to do so as well. At Newton South, it started with one transfer the first year. There were two more the next. A third of the team was gone the following year. It became normalized to the point that even players from the junior varsity team were reclassing to private schools.
My former coach, Corey Lowe, scored 1,000 points as a high school basketball player at Newton North, celebrated a 77-1 record at the school, and then played on the team at Boston University, where he holds the school’s all-time record for 3-pointers. When he started coaching us at South three years ago, he harped on changing South’s culture to one like North’s, where kids are less likely to leave and the team won more consistently. “I love the city and I want to make the South just as competitive as the North,” he told the Globe in 2023. Clearly he lost hope because 18 months later, he took off for the head coaching job at Saint John’s Prep.
Set aside winning: The emotional effects of transfer culture are harsh. Players know that spending an entire season together, along with summer league, fall league, YMCA time, and food runs, turns a team into a family. A viral clip from 2016 features a reporter asking Boston College senior Dennis Clifford about his favorite BC basketball memory. After fighting back tears, Clifford squeaked out “going out to eat.” I get that. The experiences shared with teammates are one of the best rewards of playing sports.
The pressures of reclassing also encourage putting the “me” over the “we.” More than most sports, basketball requires a team ethos — taking a charge, cutting away from the ball, making one more pass. On occasion, private school coaches came to watch one of our games and scout one of my teammates. In these games, I knew I would most certainly not be getting the ball.
Even more important is community, the core of high school athletics. Playing in front of families and friends you grew up with, looking up to the players before you, encouraging the younger ones after you. I loved playing in front of, but also being in, the crowds. Nights where I squeezed into the packed student section for volleyball or football games are ones I’ll always remember. Reclass culture shifts the focus away from community, turning high school sports into a stepping stone toward recruitment.
People have made many arguments against reclassing: Gaining an extra athletic year is unfair, it’s not affordable for everyone, public schools are a public good. But student athletes who reclass shouldn’t take all the blame. They’re navigating a system that has made it increasingly difficult to get into a top-tier college program without the advantages of private high school athletics — better coaching, connections, facilities, and competition.
When I first heard the news that my teammates were transferring, I was mainly angry. They had jumped ship just as our basketball program was coming into its own. Looking back, while I do sometimes still feel indignant, I blame the current state of high school athletics. My teammates were just trying to follow their passion as best they could in the system we have. For most of us, sports are about the love of the game, the friendships we make, and the community. When too many of us make high school sports primarily about the pursuit of sponsorship money or scholarships, it comes at a steep cost to everyone.
