Cooper Flagg, Derik Queen and Asa Newell were the first three prospects to stroll into the interview room at the NBA draft combine in Chicago, cracking jokes as they prepared to meet the media for the first time as prospective NBA players. While the scene around them may have been a bit different, it was hardly the first time this trio of basketball prodigies had moved as a pack.
The dream of playing in the NBA with your best friend from high school? Multiply that by three, and you have the feeling the 2023–24 Montverde Academy boys basketball team is experiencing. Flagg is the presumptive No. 1 pick. Queen, a center who was the Big Ten Freshman of the Year at Maryland, is projected as a potential top-10 selection. Newell, who led Georgia in scoring and rebounding, and Liam McNeeley, a forward who was the Big East Freshman of the Year at UConn, could go anywhere from the late lottery to the end of the first round. The fifth starter from that superteam, point guard Robert Wright III, is heading to BYU on a reported $3 million deal after having starred at Baylor as a freshman last year.
Under legendary coach Kevin Boyle, Montverde was far from your ordinary high school. The program recruited talent from all over the world, regularly producing top college talents and NBA prospects. But the dominance of its 2023–24 team and the careers its stars are headed toward give it a strong case to be considered the best prep basketball team of all time. When asked if that’s the case, Queen replies very matter-of-factly: “Yes. No question.”
Boyle, now the head coach at Spire Academy in Ohio, can't make quite the same commitment. That’s because his 2023–24 team’s top competitor is 2019–20 Montverde, also coached by Boyle. That squad featured the No. 1 (Cade Cunningham) and No. 4 (Scottie Barnes) picks in the 2021 draft, both of whom have already been NBA All-Stars. Three other future first-rounders played on that team.
“Who would win? [I’d] just getting in trouble saying so,” Boyle says. “And it’s hard to say. It’s really hard to say. The one team’s got two All-Stars, so the 2024 team still has some work to do. But it would be a hell of a series.”
The numbers put up by the 2023–24 Montverde squad are staggering. After a 90-point exhibition win over South Lake (Groveland, Fla.) High, its record was a perfect 33–0, concluding with a 16-point victory over Virginia-based powerhouse St. Paul VI Catholic High in the national title game. Thirty wins were by double figures, with an overall average margin of 29.8 points per game.
Montverde did all this while playing against some of the most elite teams in the country. The Eagles beat Columbus High, winners of the last four Florida 7A state championships, by 28. It dismissed AZ Compass Prep, which featured nine Division I players including projected top-10 pick Jeremiah Fears, by a combined 27 points in two meetings. California-based Prolific Prep, which had the No. 1 players in both the 2025 and ’26 high school classes, at least pushed Montverde, but the Eagles won both meetings. That’s why Boyle believes his two Montverde teams clearly top other frequently posited candidates for the best team ever, such as the 2016 Chino Hills High team led by Lonzo, LiAngelo and LaMelo Ball.
“The best 10 to 20 teams are superteams,” Boyle says. “So when you’re playing those teams, it’s not like five, 10, 15 years ago, when you were playing good high school teams [with] maybe stars in one or two of them. Now you’re playing teams that have eight guys going to major Division I. More of those guys are on the same team. It’s much harder to win.”
The most recent team’s four likely first-rounders all spent at least two seasons at Montverde. They experienced a gutting loss to Sunrise Christian Academy in the national quarterfinals in 2023 but made plans to run it back as older, better players with one thing on their minds: dominance. “We knew we had to win or it was going to look really bad,” McNeeley says. “We knew we couldn’t lose a game.”
Practices were brutally tough, often far more competitive than the games themselves. Queen sharpened his game against Newell and Flagg in daily battles in the paint. Flagg developed his perimeter game by being guarded by McNeeley, one of the toughest defenders in the class. Plenty of trash talk followed. (Queen says he deserves the crown for best Montverde trash-talker.) Sometimes the jawing would push the boundaries, but the core four and two other top seniors (Wright and Curtis Givens) had their sights set on perfection. And Flagg, despite being the youngest of the group, emerged as one of the top leaders Montverde ever saw in the Boyle era.
“When your best player wants to be coached hard as s---, everyone else falls in line with that,” assistant coach Matt Cohen says. “He was bringing it in practice, talking trash every day, you know, getting guys to stay after to play one-on-one for hours and getting extra work in at night. Everyone wanted to work out with him.”
There was one memorable game on the road in February 2024 against powerhouse Long Island Lutheran, then the No. 2 team in the country (behind Montverde). It featured guard VJ Edgecombe, a likely top-five pick, as well as Kiyan Anthony, a Syracuse commit who is Carmelo Anthony’s son. Despite some early chirping from the local fans, Long Island Lutheran proved no match for the Eagles, who won by 32 points and demonstrated yet again just how big the gap was between them and the rest of high school basketball.
“You’d get some games where we’d start out a little slow and you’d get some ‘overrated’ chants or something, and then I’m like, Oh no, here we go, they woke up the beast,” Cohen says. “Teams were hyped up to play us, but you’d just see the fear in their eyes as soon as we were up 10 and they realized they had no chance.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Cooper Flagg’s Montverde Makes Case for Best High School Team of All Time.