ORANGEVILLE—Watching Thon Maker compete against other high school kids, it just seems unfair.

The 17-year-old basketball phenom stands more than seven feet tall — with a seven-foot-two wingspan — and he gallops up and down the court with a quickness and agility that belies his elongated frame. This is no lumbering big man.

So you can’t help but feel for his opponents as they are repeatedly stuffed, blocked and dunked upon.

Big Tuna seems a ready-made nickname for the lithe giant, but Maker says he’s never heard it. “People call me lots of stuff, but never that.”

A Sudanese-Australian who spent most of his nascent playing career in the U.S., Maker is arguably the best high school basketball player in the world. Earlier this year he surprised the sport’s prospect watchers when he announced he was leaving his U.S. prep school and taking his talents north of the border to this mostly rural town about 80 kilometres north of Toronto. “This was the best opportunity for me to grow as a player,” he says.

Maker could have played anywhere, but he chose Orangeville’s Athlete Institute, a high-performance training centre that’s also home to Canada’s first year-round basketball academy for high school students. No doubt, the highly touted seven-footer is a big catch for the burgeoning program, but in many ways he represents something bigger: Canada’s ongoing evolution as a basketball hotbed.











“I think it’s just another expression of how this sport is developing in Canada,” says Roy Rana, head coach of Ryerson University’s men’s basketball team and the national junior men’s squad.

The Orangeville program was launched to give the country’s top high school prospects — such as Kitchener’s Jamal Murray and Malton’s Jalen Poyser — a viable option to hone their skills closer to home rather than losing them to the U.S. But with this year’s addition of Maker, not only is the Athlete Institute countering Canada’s basketball drain, it’s attracting the best players from outside the country, too.

“It just really puts a stamp on us (showing that) not only is it a really good option for the top Canadians, but it’s a really good option for the top players in the world,” says Jesse Tipping, the institute’s 30-year-old president.

MAKER’S MARK

Today he seems a natural, but Maker only started playing organized basketball a few years ago. Growing up in what is now South Sudan, he was drawn more to soccer, which he says he played with the same compulsive intensity.

Before his sixth birthday he moved with his family to Perth, Australia, in search of a better education. Despite his home country’s history of conflict, Maker says his family was not fleeing violence or any great hardship. He had a happy childhood and lived comfortably. “I was just living the life of a normal kid.”

He wasn’t at all interested in basketball until 2008 when the NBA final was broadcast in Australia and, as an 11-year-old, he watched Kevin Garnett and the Boston Celtics beat Kobe Bryant and the L.A. Lakers.

Messing around with friends, he would try to mimic what he had seen on TV. At 13, he had already grown to six-foot-eight when he was spotted by Edward Smith, an American basketball coach working in Sydney. Smith remembers how unrefined Maker was back then: “He had no skills, but he had tenacity and a willingness to compete.”

Smith convinced Maker’s family to allow him to move from Perth to Sydney to focus on basketball. The coach also became Maker’s legal guardian and later moved him (and his own family) to the U.S., where Maker spent two seasons playing at a prep school in Carlisle, Va., before joining Orangeville Prep this year.

In that short span Maker has emerged as perhaps the most famous basketball player of his age group, garnering a catalogue of YouTube mixtapes while collecting scholarship offers from every NCAA powerhouse.

Prospect junkies joke that Maker could have been designed in a video game. He has the body of a towering centre, the scoring skills of a forward and the ball-handling abilities of a guard, read the gushing scouting reports.

Orangeville’s head coach, Larry Blunt, said that versatility distinguishes Maker from other up-and-coming players. Blunt says Maker has the “competitive spirit” of Garnett, can shoot like Kevin Durant and has the footwork and post play of Hakeem Olajuwon.

“He’s a hybrid of a lot of really good players and I think that makes him very, very unique,” Blunt said. “But when it’s all said and done I think he will be the one people will compare others to.”

CHOOSING ORANGEVILLE

The Athlete Institute can thank a backlog in U.S. immigration for helping them land Maker, who had to leave the States in August 2013 in order to renew his visa. Rather than travel all the way back to Australia, he and Smith made the much shorter trip to Toronto for what they thought would be just a day or two.

But the paperwork took longer than expected, so Smith started looking around for a place for Maker to train while they waited. He knew Blunt from Virginia’s basketball community and gave him a call to see if Maker could get into their gym. Once Maker saw the Athlete Institute’s facilities, he fell in love. The sojourn also afforded him the chance to play in Drake’s OVO Bounce tournament, where he went one-on-one with Raptors forward Amir Johnson and earned accolades from the star-studded event.

Toronto, meanwhile, reminded Maker of Sydney. He says he felt immediately comfortable and if he hadn’t already committed to Carlisle, he would have simply stayed. But the seeds were sown for his return to Ontario.

Now in just its third year of operation, the Athlete Institute’s basketball academy — a.k.a. Orangeville Prep — is turning heads in the high school world while becoming a popular destination for NCAA scouts.

“This year’s a big year for us,” says Tipping, who co-founded the institute in 2010. “People in the U.S. are blown away because it’s never happened before. Nobody from Canada has ever been a viable competition before. Nobody’s had the No. 1 players want to stay in Canada, want to be in Canada. Everyone’s always trying to get out.”

Tipping, whose father James built the family’s fortune in the trucking industry, was an elite basketball player himself, along with his brother and sister.

Tipping went to Aurora’s St. Andrew’s College, where he got a great education but didn’t develop as much as he would have liked athletically. His siblings, by comparison, went south to Florida’s IMG Academy, where they excelled athletically but earned a subpar education, limiting their NCAA opportunities.

With Orangeville Prep, Tipping said he wanted to build something that offered the best of both worlds. “I’m basically trying to create what I wanted to go to.”

On the basketball side he teamed with CIA Bounce, the Brampton-based development program that produced back-to-back first overall picks Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins, as well as Phoenix Suns guard Tyler Ennis.

For schooling they partnered with Orangeville District Secondary, the local public high school, where the players are bused to and from every day. Outsourcing the education ensures the players’ academic credentials are up to snuff, while also avoiding the pitfalls of some of the fly-by-night operations south of the border that have recently come under more scrutiny for their shoddy attention to the school side of the equation.

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Wendy McIntosh-Clodd, vice-principal at Orangeville District, said the partnership has worked out well for them, too.

“They’re wonderful boys, oh my goodness,” she said. “They bring a lot to the table for us as far as respect and that culture of character.”

There was some concern within the community, McIntosh-Clodd said, that the players would get a free pass.

“I don’t have a lot of knowledge about prep schools or what they do in the States,” she said. “I only know education, and we would definitely never lower the bar for anybody. A credit’s a credit and you need to meet that expectation.”

She said there’s never been any attempt by the Athlete Institute to interfere with that. “They know that they don’t cross the line into academics and we don’t cross the line into basketball, and then we just try to work together.”

The school did, however, have to adjust to meet the boys’ needs in other areas. The regular desks weren’t big enough.

“Yeah, the first desk I had was really uncomfortable,” Maker says. “I couldn’t really fit in it. But they got me another one.”

SUSTAINING EXCELLENCE

Attending the Athlete Institute is not cheap. A year’s “tuition” costs more than $28,000, but includes all room and board, team travel expenses, uniforms and, of course, access to the state-of-the-art facilities, coaches, trainers and the strength and conditioning program. A number of players in the basketball program are on full or partial scholarship, though Tipping would not say exactly how many.

While Maker’s addition gave the program some star power, Tipping said the real turning point came when Murray — perhaps Canada’s next great star — committed in the summer of 2013, just a few months after winning MVP honours at the prestigious Jordan Brand Classic.

“It really showed a lot of the world that this is a really viable option for the top players,” he said. “That was sort of the moment when people opened their eyes and said, ‘Oh, this is for real.’ ”

Another domino fell in the form of Poyser, who committed the same summer after a year at a U.S. prep school. “Once I knew what Orangeville was building, I knew I wanted to be here,” Poyser said. “Who wouldn’t want to stay close to home when you’re going to high school, and why not build something here and try to make history?”

Poyser doesn’t shy away from grand pronouncements: “In my mind we’re the best team in North America.”

Orangeville’s stacked squad doesn’t have much meaningful competition close to home. Their tests come when they travel to the U.S., beginning this past weekend in Kentucky at the Bluegrass Showcase, which featured many of the top U.S. high school teams.

The team is certainly strong enough at the moment to compete with the best. Rana, the Ryerson and junior national coach, said the program’s greatest challenge will be sustaining success once these players graduate.

“It’s one thing to get something of excellence going,” he said. “It’s another thing to keep that for a long period of time, and that’s really what separates great programs in any sport at any level.”

In the shorter term, there are lingering questions about Maker’s future. For now he isn’t scheduled to graduate until 2016, but because of his age he is eligible to reclassify in order to fast-track his path to the NCAA. He already has standing offers from more than a dozen Division I schools.

But Maker wants to be sure he and his still-growing body are ready for the rigours of college ball. Smith said a decision on whether to reclassify won’t be made until some time in the new year.

For now he’s just enjoying his new team, which includes his younger brother, Matur, the runt of the litter at a mere six-foot-10: “It’s been a joy to play beside him. He is getting really good, really fast. We’re pushing each other.”

Maker believes in fate. He believes there was a reason why his visa was delayed and he had the chance to glimpse what Orangeville had to offer. At the same time, he says, no matter where he plays his goal is the same.

“Wherever I ended up, my mind was set on being great.”

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