The Best States for High School Basketball in 2024
Just like in football, the common consensus in basketball is that the ‘Big 3’ – California, Texas, and Florida – have the highest quality athletics. When we looked at high school football, we found that this wasn’t true! This time, we’ll also see that this is untrue in basketball.
In fact, we’ll see that the best state for high school basketball is…New Hampshire? Followed closely by the District of Columbia.
These answers are distinctly different from intuition. Surely the answer must be California, Texas, or Florida. Or maybe some of the states hosting the blue blood schools – North Carolina, or Texas, or Kentucky?
But no. New Hampshire is where it’s at. Apparently.
Methodology
Our methodology for determining the best states for high school basketball is identical to the methodology we used for football. However, for completeness I’ll repeat the description here.
There are essentially two routes to compare the quality of different states: comparing the quality of the teams versus comparing the quality of individual players. Our method compares the quality of individual players by counting the number of division 1 scholarships. While this isn’t a perfect measure, it should capture how much top-end talent exists in a given state. Then, we normalize the total number of scholarships by the state’s population so that the states that are larger don’t have an unfair advantage.
The other possibility – using the relative quality of all the teams to determine the quality of a sport in a state – was discarded mainly due to multiple difficulties associated with this potential metric. Chief amongst these difficulties is that, because most schools play schedules overwhelmingly consisting of teams from their own states it is very difficult to draw meaningful comparisons between states. There are simply too few games played between inter-state opponents to create a meaningful sample size to rank states relative to one another.
When we use individual player quality to determine the quality of a state in high school basketball, we can use recruiting rankings to draw a fair comparison of players from different states. College basketball recruits are given a ranking amongst all players across the country. In this way, we have a fair comparison of the high school basketball talent from state to state.
Because of these considerations, we choose to use the number of division one scholarships per capita in order to determine the best states for high school basketball.
The Best States for High School Basketball
To reduce variance of recruiting from year to year, to determine our overall high school basketball state rankings we aggregate the number of recruits over the past five years. The top 5 best states for high school basketball that we found over the period from 2017-2024 was:
- New Hampshire: 8 scholarships per Million
- District of Columbia: 6.9 Scholarships per Million
- Kansas: 4.7 Scholarships per Million
- Vermont: 4 Scholarships per Million
- Wyoming (??): 4 Scholarships per Million
Shown in the image below is a color-coded US map where deeper shades of blue indicate the best states for high school basketball.
I will point out that comparing this map to the corresponding map I presented when studying the best high school football states, we see that basketball talent tends to be more evenly distributed across the country. Perhaps the only surprise to me is that the District of Columbia isn’t even better. Maybe my opinion is biased because (in my opinion) the current world’s greatest basketball player, Kevin Durant, is from DC. However, more convincingly, if football is a rural sport played in fields and parks, basketball is an urban sport played in gyms and rec centers. Washington DC as a “state” is actually just a city. I would therefore excerpt the density of talent in DC to be even higher.
Moreover, if we look at those states which produce the least high school basketball talent, we come up with the following list of the worst states for high school basketball.
51) Alaska: 0 Scholarships per Million
50) Hawaii: 0.14 Scholarships per Million
49) Montana: 0.36 Scholarships per Million
48) South Dakota: 0.44 Scholarships per Million
47) Oregon: 0.51 Scholarships per Million
When studying football, I claimed that I was disappointed in the number of scholarships from the state of New York. New York is exceedingly more disappointing in basketball. If you ask the Knicks, New York City is the Mecca of basketball. At the college level, New York is home to Syracuse, St. Johns, St. Bonaventure, Fordham, Sienna, and many, many others. Yet still: the State of New York is only able to produce 0.69 Scholarships per million – good for the 8th worst basketball state around.
Best States for High School Basketball by Position
Though there are really five positions on the court, basketball positions naturally group themselves into two subsets: guards and bigs. What happens when we split all the basketball scholarships based on whether a player is a guard or a big? Do different states have different proclivities to generate talent at certain positions? The two images below show the density of scholarships per million for each of these position groups.
Personally, I see almost no distinction between these two images. That is, separating the best states for high school basketball into the best states for guards and the best states for bigs yields almost no difference. A good basketball state is good at all positions.
The Best High School Basketball States in the Past
The oldest season in the 247sports database is 2003. So, if we compare our aggregate rankings from the years 2017-2024, do we see a difference in the quality of basketball in a given state over time? Shown in the image below is the top five basketball states in scholarships per million in the 2003 recruiting class:
- Kansas: 11.3 Scholarships per Million
- Maine: 10.7 Scholarships per Million
- Iowa: 6.9 Scholarships per Million
- New Hampshire: 6.2 Scholarships per Million
- Utah: 5.2 Scholarships per Million
The data for the entire country is included in the image below.
While there are certainly differences, variations, from 2003 to 2024, I don’t think they may be attributable to anything other than normal randomness. The Northeast and Kansas are still great. The rest of the country is about even in overall quality.
High School Basketball State Rankings Without Population Normalization
Some may argue with my technique of normalizing the number of scholarships by the population. After all: if the most D1 Scholarships are awarded to players from Florida, then obviously Florida has to be the best state for high school basketball right? I generally disagree, but for those who are interested in this argument and this line of reasoning, here are the top 5 best states for high school basketball without normalizing for population at all.
- Florida: 59.8 Scholarships per Year
- Texas: 50 Scholarships per Year
- California: 48 Scholarships per Year
- Georgia: 34 Scholarships per Year
- Virginia: 24.2 Scholarships per Year
And, as always, the graphic showing the relative ranking of each state in “total division one scholarships per year” is included below.
Conclusions
If the deep south dominates football talent, then the best states for high school basketball are in the Northeast. While there are certainly some states – Kansas, DC, Iowa for example – that routinely rank near the top, the quality of the basketball recruits in New England is the best. And, perhaps most importantly, the conventional wisdom that California, Florida, and Texas dominate the high school basketball scene is not only a little wrong, it is very wrong.
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