The Long Way Up

WAKE FOREST, N.C. — On a Saturday night in Atlanta in February 2025, two teenagers combined for 107 points in a high school gym and the sport briefly stopped to watch. Darryn Peterson scored 58 for Prolific Prep, breaking a school record that had belonged to Gary Trent Jr. AJ Dybantsa answered with 49 and nine rebounds for Utah Prep. Peterson pump-faked, stepped into a corner three with a second left, and Prolific won 88–86. Sixteen months later, on June 23, 2026, Dybantsa went first overall to Washington and Peterson went second to Utah.

Brian L. Clifton had a courtside seat that night. Not as a spectator — as the broadcast's color commentator, alongside AJ Martin, calling the action live as it happened. The founder and head coach of St. Christopher Academy has spent nearly three decades in rooms like that one.

This season, his players get into them.

St. Christopher Academy is announcing its 2026-27 schedule: twenty-four games currently on the calendar, six multi-team events, and — for the first time in program history — a place on The Grind Session, the winter circuit that has become the closest thing American prep basketball has to a national league.

The Sentinels will not be starting at the top. That is the point.

What the Grind Session actually is

Founded in 2014, the Grind Session runs more than 400 games between November and March, staged as weekend showcases in gyms across the United States and Canada, with results tracked in national standings rather than state brackets. More than 3,000 of its players have gone on to college or professional basketball. Roughly 100 have reached the NBA, including more than twenty first-round draft picks — Jayson Tatum, Jamal Murray and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander among them.

Structurally, the men's circuit is a three-tier system, and the tiers are the whole story.

At the top sits the Power Conference — sixteen invitation-only programs from at least eight states and Canada, stocked in a given year with twenty-plus top-100 recruits and several presumptive lottery picks. Teams get in one of two ways: a direct invitation, or by surviving a single-elimination Power Play-In tournament. The season ends in a Round of 16 and quarterfinals in mid-March, then the High School Basketball World Championship. Prolific Prep and Utah Prep were playing a Power Conference game that night in Atlanta.

Below it is the Elevation Conference, the second tier, built explicitly as the proving ground for programs trying to earn promotion into Power.

And below that is the Contenders Conference, launched in November 2025 as the circuit's entry point for emerging programs. Four guaranteed games per weekend. Multi-court venues. Its own standalone championship in March.

St. Christopher enters in Elevation — the second tier, built as the proving ground for programs trying to earn promotion into Power. The Sentinels will play four Grind Session stops this season: Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (Nov 13–15), Owensboro, Kentucky (Dec 4–6), Memphis, Tennessee (Jan 15–18), and Huntington, West Virginia (Feb 5–7). Thirteen games against opponents the program will not meet until it arrives.

That is not an oversight in the schedule. It is the schedule.

Why Elevation is the right place to start

There is a version of this announcement that lists a softer slate and projects a winning record, and it would be easier to write.

Here is the honest version. St. Christopher went 12–13 last season across 25 games against 21 different opponents, in the program's first full year of record. The Sentinels lost to New Garden Friends by 18 and by 23. They lost to Greenville by 45 and North Augusta by 52 on back-to-back December days in Florence. They also beat Westwood Christian by one, Amandla Academy by three, and Oak Ridge Military Academy twice. Every one of those results is published on this site with the same detail, because selective publication is falsification.

They also carried a 3.89 team GPA.

What a young roster needs after a season like that is not an easier schedule. It is a structured one — a ladder with defined rungs, where the level of competition is calibrated rather than random, where results are tracked nationally, and where moving up is something a team earns on the floor instead of something a brochure claims.

That is precisely what the Grind Session's tier system provides. An Elevation schedule puts the Sentinels against programs with something to prove and a promotion to chase. Play well enough, consistently enough, and Power is the next rung. Power ends at a world championship.

Nobody at St. Christopher is promising that climb takes one year. The structure simply means the climb exists, and that every possession in Owensboro in December is part of it.

There is a second reason the circuit matters, and it is less romantic. College coaches go where the games are concentrated. A Grind Session weekend puts four games on film in three days, in a building with scouts in it, with the results posted to a national table. For a program whose entire premise is that each athlete's recruiting case should be one a coach can independently check, that is the correct venue.

Coach Clifton knows the circuit from the inside; he serves as its Executive Director of International Initiatives and Strategic Partnerships. He also knows exactly what the top of it looks like, having called one of its signature games from press row.

The 2026-27 Sentinels

Ten athletes will wear the Sentinel badge this season. Five are new to the program.

Mani, Pulley, Bond, Fogg and Roach arrive for their first season with the program. Okauru, Brodie Clifton, Dougie Jenkins, Landry Jenkins and Brantley Jenkins return.

Note the class years. Six of the ten are 2029 or later. The oldest athletes on this roster will still be juniors when the 2028 class graduates. This is a group being built for the back half of the decade, which is another way of saying the 2026-27 season is an investment rather than a harvest.

Stat lines begin when games do. They will be logged live courtside, as always.

The opponents

The non-circuit schedule was assembled on a simple principle: take the best game available.

The season opener is Nov 3 at Fayetteville Academy, a program that sat atop the NCISAA Sandhills at 12–4 in late December last season and has been a fixture in the classification's championship conversation. It is a road game, against a proven team, in week one. That is deliberate.

Three days later the Sentinels travel to Greensboro to face New Garden Friends — the reigning NCISAA 1A state champion. The Bears were 10–10 last February, then won ten straight, then erased a 17-point third-quarter deficit in the final to beat Crossroads Christian 52–47. They beat St. Christopher twice last season. This is the rematch, and the Bears are better now than they were then.

North Raleigh Christian Academy (Nov 5) and St. David's School (Nov 17) bring two of the Triangle's established independent-school programs. St. David's beat the Sentinels 71–46 last December.

Thales Academy Rolesville appears twice — Nov 19 on the road and Dec 8 at home. The teams split last season, Thales winning 74–62 in January before St. Christopher answered 42–32 twelve days later. It is the closest thing this program currently has to a rivalry.

Oak Ridge Military Academy also appears twice, Jan 11 and Feb 3, both in Oak Ridge. The Sentinels swept the Eagles last year, 67–47 and 73–65 — two of the program's better nights.

The season's furthest trip is Jan 7 at The St. James in Springfield, Virginia. The St. James Performance Academy opened in August 2024 inside one of the largest multi-sport complexes on the East Coast, runs a full-day training-and-academics model, competes in EYBL Scholastic, and is coached by Book Richardson. It is, in nearly every structural respect, the model St. Christopher is building toward. Playing them is a measurement.

Two more multi-team events round out the calendar: the Gray Collegiate showcase in West Columbia, South Carolina (Dec 10–11), and the Carolina Lowcountry Invitational in Charleston (Dec 28–30). The Lowcountry event is one of the largest holiday tournaments in the Southeast — 134 teams across four days in its 2025 edition, spread across host gyms throughout the Charleston area, with varsity and JV fields for both boys and girls. The Sentinels went 1–2 there last winter, beating Westminster Schools of Augusta 65–56 before losing to Uwharrie Charter Academy 50–46 and Smith County 79–46. They return with a different roster and a season of Grind Session games behind them.

The schedule remains in progress. Additional games are being finalized and will be posted to the schedule page as they are confirmed.

The tape

Which brings it back to Atlanta.

Peterson and Dybantsa met twice on the 2024-25 Grind Session schedule. The first came in December at Murray State, a game that stayed within one possession for 31 of its 32 minutes and ended 76–70 for Prolific Prep, with Peterson posting 32 points, 10 rebounds and eight assists against Dybantsa's 28, eight and six. The second was the one in February — the 88–86 game, the 58 and the 49, the corner three with a second left.

Coach Clifton called it live, with AJ Martin, from the press table.

It is worth watching in full, and not only because the two best players on the floor became the first two picks in the draft. Watch how they guard each other in the fourth quarter. Watch the spacing, the switching, the way both teams treat every possession like the last four minutes of a playoff game. That is what the top of this circuit looks like.

There is one more thread. When Washington selected Dybantsa first overall in June, it was the franchise's first No. 1 pick since 2010 — when the Wizards took John Wall, whom Clifton coached from high school through draft night.

The distance between a gym in Wake Forest and a stage in Brooklyn is enormous, and this program is not pretending otherwise. Ten athletes, most of them years from graduating, are about to play the hardest schedule anyone would give them.

Every athlete's goal is Division I. That is a standard, not a promise. The work of proving it starts November 3 in Fayetteville.