Dwayne Mitchell, the new head coach at Manhattan Rice High School, confirms that 6-foot-9 senior forward Kadeem Jack will head to  South Kent (Conn.) next year and not college.

“Right now, I just know Kadeem is committed to going to South Kent,” Mitchell said Thursday night. “Until he’s there and he’s going to class, he could change his mind. But right now that’s where he said he’s going, South Kent.”

Reached earlier this week by text, Jack confirmed that he would indeed spend a year at prep school.

“Yea,” he wrote.

Jack will be joined at South Kent by Forest Hill (Queens) High junior wing and UConn commit Maurice Harkless, who also announced his intention to play at the school. (more…)

UConn is holding a press conference at 10 a.m. on Friday to announce an update to the NCAA investigation of its men’s basketball program.

What the press release from UConn announcing the presser did not mention — and what The Hartford Courant first reported — is that assistant coach Pat Sellers and director of basketball operations Beau Archibald have resigned from the staff in the wake of the investigation.

Sellers did not immediately respond to a text message and a voicemail seeking comment. (more…)

GREENBURGH, N.Y. – Keith “Tiny” Gallon says his mother needed $3,000 from a former Merrill Lynch financial adviser to get his high school transcript released so that he could attend Oklahoma University.

“Oak Hill wouldn’t release my transcript under no circumstances and my mother had to do what she had to do,” Gallon said Thursday following a workout with the Knicks at their training facility.

“It wasn’t an agent, it was a financial adviser. She got the money from him, got my transcript out of Oak Hill Academy. I got a single mother. When she got the money, she paid the financial adviser back through my freshmen year.”

TMZ.com broke the news in March that financial adviser Jeffrey Hausinger last August wired $3,000 into a joint back account owned by Gallon and his mother, Sylvia Wright. (more…)

GREENBURGH, N.Y. – Having played in the Ivy League, Jeff Foote can’t quite imagine getting LeBron James as a teammate.

But if the 7-foot Foote gets drafted by the Knicks and New York lands LeBron via free agency, it will be a whole new world for the Cornell product.

“It would be a different experience going to a lockerroom having LeBron James or Dwyane Wade sitting there, Dirk Nowitzki or Chris Bosh,” Foote said, referring to the top 2010 NBA free agents. “It’s just a lot of excitement. (more…)

I know most folks who come to this blog are looking for hoops and rock ‘n’ roll news.

But I couldn’t help but put up this picture I took Tuesday of my 2-year-old son, James, thoroughly enjoying a vanilla ice cream cone in Union Square.

James loves him some ice cream, and often has a lime popsicle to start his day…followed by an ice cream later in the day.

He’s already got a natural Frisbee flick (forehand) and we hope he’ll be out on the Ultimate field before his old man has to hang up the cleats and retire completely.

Enjoy the summer…nothing like it.

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There were some big stories in the college and prep hoops world in the last 24 hours…

**Yahoo! Sports broke the news of the Kansas ticket scandal that has everyone in college hoops talking. Kansas announced that six university employees engaged in a scam that sold off more than $1 million in basketball and football tickets over the past five years. The story indicates college power brokers Dana and David Pump (pictured) orchestrated the scam and have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in ticket scams at the 2002 and ’03 NCAA tournaments.

This is the latest black eye for a Kansas program that last year made news when members of the basketball and football teams got into fights with one another on campus. (more…)

Jamir Hanner, a 6-foot-8, 200-pound forward who verbally committed to Seton Hall in March, plans to spend another prep year at Newark (N.J.) Nia Prep and won’t enroll in college until the fall of 2011.

“Yes,” Hanner said Wednesday by phone. “[I want] to mature more under Coach Rudy [King], to learn and understand the game more.”

Hanner was recently named to the second-team at the iS8 Nike Spring Classic in Queens, but he and King feel another year of prep school will benefit him even more.

“I think you’ll see with another year it’s going to really help him on and off the court,” said King, the former Bishop Loughlin coach. (more…)

The Big East men’s basketball tournament could be headed for yet another major change in 2011.

As first reported by Fanhouse.com, the league’s coaches voted unanimously Tuesday to eliminate the double-bye in the tournament held each March at Madison Square Garden. The new format – which would involve all 16 teams playing first-round games over a two-day period – could be approved by the end of next month.

“We’ll probably have an answer by the end of June,” Big East spokesman John Paquette said by phone. “We’ll come to a conclusion by the end of June.”

Read the full story at SNY.

(Photo courtesy Getty Images)

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Remi Barry plans to visit St. John’s and Arizona State and then make a decision between those two programs and UCLA sometime in June.

The 6-foot-7 Barry said he will visit St. John’s and Arizona State “most likely the second week of June.”

He tripped from Loomis (Calif.) Del Oro High to UCLA May 16 and said he enjoyed it.

“It was really, really good,” Barry said. “I liked the campus. It’s a really nice campus. I like the guys over there. The players are really nice, really friendly. I like the coach [Ben Howland], how he pushes them and makes them work really hard.” (more…)

Karron Johnson, a 6-foot-8, 220-pound wing forward who has decommitted from Oklahoma State, is now leaning toward playing in the Big East at West Virginia beginning in 2011.

“It’s almost 75 percent sure that he wants to go to West Virginia,” said James Black, Johnson’s mentor. “We have a four-year relationship with [assistant] coach Larry Harrison at West Virginia. He’s a longtime friend of mine.”

Johnson, 19, is currently at Panama City (Fla.) Gulf Coast Community College and will have two years of college eligibility remaining once he graduates next year. (more…)