@Texas-Hawk-10
First, where would I watch Small time HS basketball games, other than attending the games in person. Essentially all the games shown on the sports networks are from the top private and public leagues and just about every single team has at least couple of really tall players 6’9" or taller.
Yes, the private and prep schools make up a very small percentage of HS basketball in this country but they make 90%+ of the players that end up in elite programs such as KU. Again, essentially all the HS basketball games I watch on TV involve elite programs with players that will be recruited by KU and all have “big” bigs. Look at the top 100 or top 150 players and you will see that probably half come from Catholic Schools alone; look at the current KU recruits, 2 out of 3 (Diallo and Bragg) played for Catholic Schools.
Over 500K kids play HS BBall and out of those 150K + are seniors. Considering the the average Division I program gets between 3-4 new players every year, the combined 351 Division I programs will take roughly 1,000 new players every year or less than 1% of the available pool. Of of those ~1,000 players, KU will recruit roughly from the top 100-150 so you can see where the pool of potential candidates for KU is extremely small and those are the players I choose to watch (when available) the other 99% are never on TV anyway.
BTW and FWIW, according to several sources, the average HS BBall player is now 3"-4" taller than 40 years ago.
Maybe I should have qualified my original post by adding “on TV” after “I don’t know how much HS BBall you watch.” However, I did mentioned in my original post that I was referring to “All the top ranked teams in the Country have a few of them. ESPN3 and ESPNU as well as other sports channels show a lot of HS games and I try to catch a few here and there.” I never implied that “ALL” the programs in the country have them.
So much for that, let’s move on…