LONDON, Ky. — The green letters on the electronic sign beside Hal Rogers Parkway flash, “Welcome to the Jungle.” But North Laurel High School, home of the Jaguars, presents a serene exterior on this February evening. Nothing wild seems to be happening here.
The surrounding hillsides are blanketed in snow and cold and quiet, and the pickup-dotted parking lot behind the gym is less than half full. The best show in town, in Laurel County, in the entire basketball-mad state of Kentucky, is available for only limited in-person viewing.
Inside the gym, the 14-member North Laurel pep band is bleating out an endearingly threadbare version of “Sweet Caroline.” This is a trusty audience-participation tune, but there is not much audience and even less participation—an arena that seats 2,200 has fewer than 200 fans in it, per restrictions. As such, ticket demand dwarfs supply. “If it weren’t for COVID-19, we would be standing-room-only every game,” says coach Nate Valentine. “I’ve had everybody from the mailman to the UPS people to you name it calling or knocking on the door asking for tickets.”
Laurel Countians badly want to see their Jaguars, 19–0 and ranked No. 2 and leading the state in scoring at 90.3 points per game. Most of all, they’re eager to gauge the game of the team’s point-guard prodigy, the son of two University of Kentucky greats, sophomore Reed Sheppard. Everyone is impatiently waiting to witness the biggest basketball recruit to come out of the mountains of Eastern Kentucky in decades—and to see if he can bring about a change in the increasingly unpopular way the Wildcats roster is constructed.
The son of Jeff and Stacey Sheppard—the Most Outstanding Player of the men’s 1998 Final Four and a top-15 career scorer in the women’s program at UK—is routinely blowing up box scores. He is averaging a state-leading 33.1 points per game, twice scoring more than 50. He’s had multiple triple doubles, including one game with 17 assists. But it’s happening against modest competition, in a sparsely populated part of the state, amid a recruiting shutdown.
For now, Sheppard is an echo, a word-of-mouth myth wrapped in COVID-19 mystery. In a world where young basketball talents tend to be overexposed by age 16, here comes one with a rare element of suspense. The 2020 AAU circuit barely existed, and college coaches still haven’t been permitted to go on the road to see prospects. Recruiting websites barely have a book of any kind on the 6' 2" sophomore point guard.
The statistics and highlight videos and bloodlines have built the hype; will it turn out to be real? And if it is real, will Kentucky coach John Calipari halt the one-and-done NBA assembly line—which rarely uses in-state parts—to make a scholarship offer to Sheppard?
“It’s going to be the big story of the next couple years,” says longtime columnist John Clay. “Is Cal going to recruit him? How hard is he going to recruit him? And is he going to get him?”
It is here, in this Appalachian town of about 8,000 deep in Big Blue country, where the next referendum on Calipari’s increasingly ineffective and locally unpopular recruiting philosophy could play out. The path to college basketball national championships the past five years is to “get old and stay old,” to use the term currently popular with coaches. is 21 and 22; is 18 and 19. The young guys who view UK as an NBA stopover have stopped delivering Final Fours and national titles for Calipari, who last led a team to the Final Four in 2015 and whose current squad is putting the finishing touches on the school’s first losing season in 32 years. So is he willing to try a different approach? And could that different approach start with a Kentucky legacy recruit from a region of the state that has always been politically complicated for coaches of the Cats?
