By Marcus Shockley
This national high school basketball ranking combines multiple available polls for a period of time into a single poll, and creates a ranking for each team based on their average ranking, number of times they are ranked in the various polls, the highest ranking that teams has in those polls and the average ranking. Read more about today’s cumulative ranking below.
| School | Location | High | AVG | Qty | TrueRank™ | |
| 1. | Montverde Academy | Montverde, FL | 1 | 1 | 3 | 26.667 |
| 2. | Findlay Prep | Henderson, NV | 2 | 2 | 2 | 25.000 |
| 3. | Huntington Prep | Huntington,WV | 1 | 4 | 3 | 23.000 |
| 4. | Mater Dei HS | Santa Ana, CA | 4 | 6 | 3 | 19.667 |
| 5. | St. Benedict Prep | Newark,NJ | 4 | 7 | 3 | 18.000 |
| 6. | Desoto HS | Dallas, TX | 3 | 8 | 3 | 17.333 |
| 7. | Poly HS | Long Beach, CA | 7 | 8 | 3 | 15.333 |
| 8. | Loyola High School | Los Angeles, CA | 5 | 5 | 1 | 14.000 |
| 9. | Whitney Young | Chicago IL | 8 | 9 | 3 | 13.667 |
| 10. | La Lumiere School | La Porte, IN | 6 | 9 | 2 | 12.500 |
| 11. | Oak Hill Academy | Mouth of Wilson, VA | 9 | 10 | 3 | 12.000 |
| 12. | North Little Rock HS | Little Rock, AR | 6 | 6 | 1 | 11.000 |
| 13. | St. Anthony HS | Jersey City, NJ | 7 | 15 | 3 | 6.333 |
| 14. | Simeon HS | Chicago, IL | 9 | 12 | 2 | 6.000 |
| 15. | Chester HS | Chester, PA | 11 | 17 | 3 | 2.333 |
| 16. | Neumann Goretti HS | Philadelphia, PA | 14 | 18 | 3 | -0.333 |
| 17. | Montrose Christian | Rockville, MD | 12 | 12 | 1 | -7.000 |
| 18. | St. John Bosco | Los Angeles, CA | 18 | 19 | 2 | -8.500 |
| 19. | West Charlotte HS | Charlotte, NC | 21 | 25 | 2 | -19.000 |
| 20. | Christ Presbyterian Academy | Nashville, TN | 21 | 21 | 1 | -34.000 |
| 21. | Salesian HS | Richmond, CA | 21 | 21 | 1 | -34.000 |
| 22. | Gonzaga HS | Washington, DC | 23 | 23 | 1 | -40.000 |
| 23. | White Station HS | Memphis, TN | 24 | 24 | 1 | -43.000 |
| 24. | Bishop Gorman HS | Las Vegas NV | 24 | 24 | 1 | -43.000 |
| 25. | Travis HS | Austin, TX | 27 | 27 | 1 | -53.000 |
This week we introduce the inaugural TrueRank™ National Combined Prep Basketball Rankings. The polls used in determining this TrueRank score were released during the period of 12/24/2012 to 12/30/2012. Polls published and used in this period’s calculation were from PrepNation, Hoopniks and MaxPreps. There was no national poll during this period from USA Today.
Notes: There is very little difference between #1 Monteverde Academy and #2 Findlay Prep on the national polling scene, but Findlay is not ranked in the MaxPreps Top 25 poll, which gives the edge to Monteverde. Is this an oversight on the part of MaxPreps or a statement? Hard to say – but at this point, they are having a strong enough ranking and season to still put them into the conversation.
West Charlotte continues to have a strong season and have found their way into more than one of the top 25 rankings. Chester HS also lands on several rankings, although the specific ranking for them varies pretty widely.
Wesleyan has dropped off of the national scene again after dropping two key games, one of which was to St. John Bosco who comes in at #18.
Why I made this poll: This poll is an attempt to consolidate all of the various rankings into a realistic snapshot of the top teams. I’ve noticed that with several different polls available, and with several thousand high school teams in the nation, many polls will vary greatly in which teams are ranked. This isn’t a statement about accuracy of a particular poll, just looking for an accurate consensus. Without a national playoff and tournament, the reality is that there isn’t a solid way to ultimately determine where teams fall.
My plan is calculate these rankings each week, as long as there is more than one poll available. I will likely adjust the formula/frequency of calculation depending on available data. At this point, there is no input from me or Basketball Elite into the rankings beyond the calculation. That means, we don’t adjust the data in any way or input our own poll. This is strictly calculated based on existing, published data.
Right now I am not including won-loss record in our calculation; this is because the individual polls should be already reflecting that. If in the future I may add in a SOS calculation, and if so, won-loss would possibly be included then.
This is a bit of an experiment; the national polls are not released at the same time so I won’t be able to release the cumulative results until I have more than one poll; however, I may add in a rolling average and soon I should also have historic polls available, as well as trends, etc.
The other thing about this initial poll is that there will likely be greater fluctuation in the 20-25 range due to the fact that several polls differ here. However, the TrueRank™ calculation is based on all teams which were ranked at all during a period.
Finally: In the poll listing, the ‘high’ value represents the highest ranking in any poll that team received during the ranking period.
‘Qty’ represents how many polls they were ranked in. ‘AVG’ represents their average ranking in all polls where they were ranked.
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Want to know more? You can follow Marcus Shockley on Twitter.
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