City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin) &
Tom Reifsnyder (@tom_reifsnyder)
--

One prospective state champion is losing its best player just a few weeks before the season gets underway.

Multiple sources have confirmed to CoBL that Conwell-Egan senior Stevie Jordan has left the Fairless Hills school he's attended for the last three years and led to its most successful season in boys' basketball history.

According to a source within Egan's program, Jordan went to Dallas to visit Advanced Prep Institute last week without telling head coach Frank Sciolla or anyone on the Egan coaching staff. The staff found out while Jordan was on the trip, and then sat down with him this past weekend to discuss his options.

The source said Jordan showed up for workouts on Monday and Tuesday, but left Wednesday morning without notifying anyone at Egan.

"[Frank] saw him Tuesday," he said. "[Stevie] said he was still thinking about it as of like 7 p.m. Tuesday. Then he left first thing Wednesday morning and no one has heard from him since."

Jordan would not respond to requests for a comment, and Conwell-Egan head coach Frank Sciolla declined to comment on the story.

One of Jordan's former Egan teammates said the team was "upset" by his decision to leave the team.

"I got to put that behind us," he said. "I can't let that affect me. I hope everything works out for him, I really do; he's a really good player and a great leader."

As a junior, Jordan--the 5-foot-11 point guard--averaged 16.8 points per game and helped the Eagles secure their first Class AA state championship in school history. Before last season, Egan had just one postseason win -- a Catholic League quarterfinal victory in the school's first season of membership in 1963-64.

Jordan had a busy summer, playing for Under Armour-sponsored Philly Pride on the AAU circuit alongside former Egan teammate Lapri McCray-Pace and then spending the entire month of August in California with his father, hip-hop/R&B musician and producer Stevie J, and four siblings to film a new show for VH1, "The Jordans take L.A."

Roughly 24 hours after returning to Pennsylvania in early September, Jordan committed to Rider University and head coach Kevin Baggett, becoming the Broncs' first member of the incoming class of 2016. Now, with Jordan changing schools, it's unclear how it will affect his verbal commitment to the Lawrenceville, New Jersey school.

Jordan will join an absolutely loaded roster at API, which features a slew of high-ranked players from Under Armour-sponsored AAU teams -- No. 4 junior Trevon Duval, No. 6 junior Billy Preston and No. 10 senior Terrance Ferguson, to name a few. Duval, a Delaware native who plays for WeR1 on the AAU circuit, transferred from St. Benedict's Prep (N.J.) earlier this month, but Preston and Ferguson aren't newcomers, per se.

Preston and Ferguson are two of four players on API's roster that played last season for Prime Prep, a Dallas charter school started by Deion Sanders that closed Jan. 30 amid allegations of theft and the mishandling of funds in addition to eligibility questions about its students. API head coach Ray Forsett, who coached Prime Prep for three years before its closing, said in a recent USA Today article that API is not the same as Prime Prep.

Joining a roster chock full of high-major recruits, Jordan will likely have to sacrifice a vast amount of the playing time and scoring responsibility he enjoyed during his three seasons with Egan.

CoBL will have more on this story as it develops