THE POINT OF CHOICE IS TO EXPAND THE CHOICE SET.

Here's an unusual manifestation of school choice.

After playing her freshman year at DeKalb High School, [new Northern Illinois post player A'jah] Davis relocated to Montverde, Florida, to attend school and play basketball for the past three years.

The decision to go to Florida wasn’t by some hail-mary chance.

Storied Huskies great on the basketball court E.C. Hill, now an assistant coach for the Towson women’s basketball team, had interviewed for the job of head girls’ basketball coach job at Montverde Academy after leaving the University of Arizona as an assistant coach in March 2016. Hill was in a period of transition back in Chicago soon after, and ran into Davis and Herilanda Thigpen, Davis’ mother.

“I had just interviewed for the job in Florida, so I talked to them about it,” Hill said, as she went on to take the job at Montverde in July.

Not that Hill and Davis’ family were ever too far separated. When Hill was back in DeKalb as an assistant with the Huskies women’s basketball team for six seasons from 2005-2011, Davis’ older sister, Chasidy, baby-sat Hill’s daughter, named Asia.

The family connections are useful in recruiting, whether it's for a powerhouse high school, or for a collegiate team.

A’Jah Davis said she knew she wanted to play at high level and felt a move was necessary to play against top-notch competition and be pushed by coaching.

“I just felt like I knew that I’d probably be recruited by a D-I school, but I still wanted to improve my game before going,” A’Jah Davis said. “I knew DeKalb [High School] wasn’t really serious about it.”

The now-freshman looked back at her high school years as a sitution that was “college-like” and introduced her to people of many different backgrounds. It also taught her time management as she traveled much for the powerhouse girls basketball program.

While coaches from other programs recruited A’Jah Davis, the Huskies staff, Lisa Carlsen and Adam Tandez in particular, paid the most mind to what was happening with A’Jah Davis’ off-court life, showing that they cared enough to make her family.

“They really care about me just outside basketball,” A’Jah Davis said. “Every time I ever talked to coach Carlsen or Adam, it was, ‘How’s your family? How’s everyone doing?’ And that, if you know me, you know my family is really important. They really took the time.”

Why not College Basketball Prep? It's likely that there are high schools not serious about forensics, or mathematics, or music, or laboratory sciences.  Or, for that matter, college preparation generally.

A side note: apparently it's easier to impose tolling on the information superhighway than on the concrete superhighway.  Most of the Shaw Media content is now behind a pay-wall, and commercial content providers are able to detect the ad-blockers that are on browsers these days.  Business is business, I suppose.