Members of The Washington Post’s Sports department have observed great high school athletes across the country, either while writing for this newspaper, reporting for another or watching while off the clock. We surveyed members of our staff to see which prep stars left a mark on their memories.
One afternoon in January 2012, I drove to an industrial district on the eastern edge of Baltimore, walked through a magnetometer and stepped inside the gym at Patterson High. It was halftime of the boys’ JV game, but it was already packed — because everyone knew the school would be turning people away by tip-off of the varsity game. We were all there to see Aquille Carr.
Around Baltimore, he was known as “Crimestopper” because even the dealers and criminals shut down business to watch his games. Listed as 5-foot-7 (and maybe not even that in reality), he possessed insane hops, handled the ball like a puppeteer and scored from everywhere on the floor.
And then he dunked, which sent the crowd into spasms of oh-Lord-no-he-didn’t ecstasy, the kind that only happen when the reality meets the hype, when you confront the supernatural, when you realize you are watching the best high school athlete you have ever seen, or will ever see.
I first saw Jake Funk play high school football as he was putting the finishing touches on his Damascus Hornets career. It was November 2015, and I was a Post intern assigned to cover the Maryland 3A semifinals. Funk was the superstar running back for the Hornets, a state powerhouse with a passionate fan base. That fall, he would go on to win the 3A title and All-Met Player of the Year. He rushed for 2,866 yards (and 11.5 yards per carry) that season, breaking the Maryland record for touchdowns with 57.
But that November night was my only exposure to his powerful, punishing greatness. He rushed for 303 yards and five touchdowns in a 48-7 win, turning what should have been a competitive game into a celebratory send-off from the home crowd. During the fourth quarter, as he watched his backup from the sideline, Funk was approached by a young fan. He wanted Funk’s autograph. In the years since, I have never seen anything like that.
He was 6-foot-4, 205 pounds with famous size 19 shoes. Imagine seeing that on the mound before a 96 mph fastball whizzed past your head — in high school. Josh Hamilton, the top overall pick in the 1999 MLB draft, was, and perhaps still is, the biggest sports talent to come through Athens Drive High, my alma mater some two miles from North Carolina State University in Raleigh. His junior year at Athens, in 1998, Hamilton batted a ridiculous .636 with 12 home runs, 20 stolen bases and 56 RBI. His at-bats became appointment viewing, even for this scrawny eighth-grader watching in awe from the bleachers. Supposedly, his bat speed was even clocked at 110 mph. Again, in high school. Hamilton was just as lethal on the mound, going 18-3 with 250 strikeouts in 143 innings in those two seasons.
If you lived in the Raleigh-Durham area, had kids in Raleigh-Durham schools or picked up a newspaper even once, you knew about Hamilton. A prodigy bred to be a prodigy.
How depraved we were 20 years ago on the winter night of Saturday, Feb. 8, 2003, in Trenton, N.J., smack near the statehouse. How amoral of us to pack a 9,000-seat arena to gawk at one 18-year-old basketball player coming out of the tunnel. How oily that some of us bought scalped tickets, while others of us got press passes, while just about all of us oohed and aahed when he threw down a dunk off a lob — during warmups. So what if his build looked futuristic; surely it could not help a young man in formative years that his high school team jetted around the country to play in 10-team “shootouts” such as this, or that his T-shirts sold for $13 in the concourse, or that we counted up his points and cooed when he had 31 by halftime. What a wicked, wretched society. Of course, he was LeBron James.
By sophomore year of high school, Michael Porter Jr. was drawing comparisons to Kevin Durant. He had the size, athleticism and range of KD — but could he really be that good? It was an unfair comparison Porter will ultimately fall short of, but on one winter night it seemed sensible. Against an overmatched mid-Missouri team, Porter drained deep three-pointers, swatted shots into the crowd and dared to dunk through his legs on a breakaway. The kid had it all.
This past spring, as the Denver Nuggets romped through the playoffs to an NBA title, Porter sporadically flashed those skills on much bigger stages than the one at Father Tolton Regional Catholic High in Columbia, Mo.
When she started high school in 2018, Kiki Rice emerged as one of the D.C. area’s best girls’ soccer players. After leading her team to a state championship, she told me soccer wasn’t even her top sport — basketball was.
Given how talented Rice was at soccer, I figured basketball would soon become her secondary sport. I had no clue she would develop into one of the country’s best high school basketball players.
Rice transformed Sidwell Friends — long known as an academic school — into a national basketball powerhouse. During her senior year in 2021-22, the guard averaged 15.8 points, 7.2 rebounds, 5.1 assists and 2.7 steals as Sidwell finished undefeated and as the country’s top team. Rice won All-Met Player of the Year and nearly every national player of the year honor.
In three soccer seasons, Rice had 80 goals and 29 assists and earned two D.C. Gatorade player of the year honors while leading Sidwell to a pair of league championships and two state titles. She now plays basketball at UCLA.
If you’re not from the Southern Tier of New York, you probably don’t know the name Joel Stephens. If you are, you most certainly do.
Stephens was a force of a running back and gazelle of an outfielder at Notre Dame High in Elmira in the early to mid-1990s when I was a sportswriter down the road in Corning. He could have played football at Syracuse but committed to play baseball at Clemson and ended up signing with the Baltimore Orioles, who somehow convinced him to go pro after taking him in the ninth round. After three years of minor league ball, he was set to resume his football career at Syracuse when he was diagnosed with colon cancer.
It’s hard to quantify the impact a high school athlete can have on a community, but I’ll leave this here: Joel Stephens was such a ridiculous combination of athlete and person that his statue — running with a football, holding it with both hands — now graces a park outside his alma mater. He died at 22.
One arm outreached all the others, caught the basketball bouncing off the rim with one hand and with a whoosh shoved the ball back and through the rim, which rattled for a second and made the net dance. The crowd that Saturday in March 1992 at the Erwin Center in Austin leaped to its feet.
The long arm was from Bobby Taylor, 6-foot-4, 190-pounds, of Longview High in the piney woods of East Texas, the greatest high school athlete I’ve ever seen. It punctuated his Lobos’ state championship victory. Bobby, the son of 1972 Olympic sprint medalist Robert Taylor, had 13 points to go with a game-best 10 rebounds and two blocks. It was only part of his precursor of a senior year that led to his all-America career as a cornerback at Notre Dame and a 10-season career in the NFL.
I saw Taylor in the Texas high school football playoffs. He was a three-year starter at defensive back and running back who was so good in football-crazy Texas he was named to the state’s all-century team.
And before he graduated, I saw him run 48.4 seconds in the 400 meters to take third in the state track and field meet and then run what seemed an even faster anchor leg to win gold for Longview’s 4×400 relay team at the same state championship.
His No. 24 is the only number retired in the century-plus history of Longview High.
Gedion Zelalem played soccer at Walter Johnson High his freshman year only, and with pristine vision and ball skills belying his age, he guided the Wildcats to the 2011 Maryland state final. In a metro area steeped in talent, this thinly built midfielder stood out. Arsenal had been eyeing him for some time, and at 16 he moved to London. Soon, he made the bench for Premier League matches and appeared in an FA Cup game. On loan, he started for Glasgow Rangers. The U.S. national team beckoned. An ACL injury at the 2017 U-20 World Cup, however, stunted his progress, and after four years in MLS, he moved to the Dutch second division.