Circle City Shootout: Surprise Teams
Scroll through the various menus on our site right now, you’ll find a ton of information on Ohio prospects who played last weekend in the Circle City Shootout. This time around, for our final recap piece, we’re going to talk a little bit about the teams.
Particularly, we’d like to shine a spotlight on those teams who don’t necessarily come to the top of your head when you think about Ohio AAU. These are the surprise teams. To be clear, these aren’t teams who have never produced high-level players or that we expected to be bad. No. These are teams that just exceeded our expectations last weekend — teams we are truly excited to watch again after strong performances.
Ohio Elite Purple 17U (OEBA)
Frankly, we mostly wanted to check in on 6’9” interior post man, James Anderson, when we first wandered over to an OEBA game. However, the more we watched this team, the more we became impressed with their collective.
OEBA is interesting in the sense that they have the type of roster you’d usually see in the winter, with a true power forward and a true center. This group doesn’t necessarily play a style that is conducive to the grassroots season, but it works for them!
Surprise performers: Ryan Rose, Branden Maughmer, Jalen Bethel
Northwest Ohio Basketball Club 17U
Okay, we know that this program is always a top performer. However, with some of their best players being absent this weekend (Jay Kaufman and Drew Johnson, amongst others), they still beat down some opponents. On Saturday, they played with five total players! They thrived in doing so, playing a collected style and not overextended their efforts while still playing an attacking half-court style.
Surprise performers: BJ Miller, Javier Quinones, Harrison Gough
Another Level
When you look at their roster, you assume Another Level is going to pose some problems for their opponents. The expectation was moderately high for this team. But, they dominated most games. For example, they played what we thought was a much more well-rounded Hidden Gems Black team on Sunday and won by a comfortable margin. The combination of Alex Heath and Jordan Burge, who we’ve wrote at length about this week, overwhelmed opponents all weekend. They imposed their playing style every game.
Surprise performers: Javon Roberts
Team One Phenoms
Simply put, we didn’t’ expect the Team One Phenoms to have two players that have Division I potential (DJ Brewton and Giovani Santiago). Santiago and Brewton were the best duo of teammates we saw, and it was indicative on the scoreboard. Both play point guard, but they somehow compliment each other’s skillset, making them a tough team to stop. Their comeback victory on Sunday was the most unbelievable thing we’ve seen in a game for a long time, as they scored 21 points in the final 2:30 of the game, 16 of which came from Brewton alone.
Surprise performers: Arian “AJ” Smith