Smith Has Big Summer
The class of 2012 has a chance to go down as the best ever in New England. With guys like Drummond, Murphy, Birch, Ledo, and Tarczewski, New England has four players who are ranked within the top ten players in the country by at least one national media outlet and five within the top thirty.
With talent like that at the top of the class, it can be easy for the rest of 2012 to get stuck behind the headlines, but this summer saw the emergence of another prospect who proved himself a priority target for high-major programs and in so doing made a case to be included on those national rankings.
Clyde Smith, a six-foot-three rising junior guard at the Hotchkiss School, turned heads while running with the New York based New Heights program, leading them to three different tournament titles in the month of July and a run to the Final Four of the Adidas Invitational where they were only knocked off by the Atlanta Celtics.
Smith might have saved his best for last as he led his squad to their final championship on the last day of the evaluation period at the NYC Summer Classic, scoring 17 points in a 63-45 win over the Long Island Lightning and earning tournament MVP honors in the process.
“It feels great. It’s always good to win in New York, in a New York tournament,” Smith told the New York Post. “I’m a Houston native so to come up here and do my thing in New York and win a championship with this team is something special.”
When Smith first arrived in New England in September of 2009, he was already an exceptionally skilled young player with a terrific long range shooting stroke and good creativity with his dribble drive game, but since that time his game has only continued to blossom. He has obviously hit the weight room hard, as he is now bigger, strong, and consequently more explosive in everything that he does.
He scored his first high major offer last spring from Notre Dame and has picked up subsequent high-major offers from Northwestern and Boston University since then according to Hotchkiss head coach Fred Benjamin. Stanford headlines the list of additional schools that have been recruiting Smith hard while Oklahoma, Wake Forest, and Virginia Tech have also shown high interest.
Smith will return to Connecticut in September for his second season in the NEPSAC where he will be one of the pillars of a Hotchkiss program that is again considered to be one of the favorites in their class.
Clyde Smith