Last month, Apple Valley High School basketball star Gary Trent Jr., one of the nation's top prospects, announced that he was leaving the Twin Cities to play his senior season for Findlay Prep, a Nevada school that specializes in preparing elite players for college basketball.

This week, however, Trent announced that he was instead going to play for a California program that essentially does the same thing.


Findlay Prep's head coach left the school earlier this month to take a job as a college assistant.

Now, Trent Jr. will play for Prolific Prep, a California-based club program whose players attend school in Napa and travel to play a national schedule during the basketball season. The model is similar to Findlay Prep, whose players attend a school outside of Las Vegas.

You can read more about Prolific Prep here.

In July, Trent's father, a former Timberwolves player, explained why his son was leaving Apple Valley, one of the state's dominant teams: ''At the typical high school, most guys on the team are not going to play basketball after high school. And within the [conference], you may face one or two Division I players throughout the season. So the best preparation that we felt for Division I college basketball was to face a Division I player every day in practice and a Division I player in every game.''

The rest of that article is here.

Apple Valley won the state Class 4A title in 2015 and, since then, Trent Jr., has starred for the U.S. national under-17 team, which won a gold medal in the FIBA world tournament earlier this summer, and in a Nike-sponsored summer league, where he was third in scoring with 22.2 points per game playing for the Twin Cities-based Howard Pulley program.

The 6-foot-5 shooting guard is ranked No. 8 in this year's recruiting class by ESPN, which has reported that his final list of five schools includes Arizona, Duke, Kentucky, Michigan State and UCLA.

Trent Jr.'s switch to Prolific Prep was first reported by Jason Jordan of USA Today. You can read his full story here.