4A Hoops Top Ten - #10 John Champe

Throughout the month of November, VirginiaPreps.com will begin previewing the upcoming 2016-17 High School Basketball season. As part of our comprehensive coverage, we will be counting down the Top Ten rankings for each classification.

The Skinny: Entering only their fifth year on the hardwood, the Knights made the move up from 3A to 4A rather successfully a year ago in going 23-5 overall and reaching the State Final Four, where they were ousted by Lake Taylor 76-69. The Knights displayed plenty of offensive firepower in averaging a whopping 77.3 points per game. Matching or exceeding their numbers from 2015-16 will be a challenge for third-year Head Coach Bill Maher and his Champe squad as five of their top six scorers from that squad have graduated.

Hardest to replace for Champe will be forward Kuony Deng, a First Team All-State selection that put up over 19 points a contest. They do return a Second Team All-State performer in 6’0” senior guard Dom Fragala (18.3PPG, 5RPG), who arrived from O’Connell and sank a team-best 67 three-pointers while also connecting on 86.3% of his free-throws (126-of-146). How the role players – such as 6’3” junior wing Trevor Cosenke, 5’10” senior guard Zion Brown and 5’10” junior guard Carl Garmon from the football team – develop around Fragala will probably determine how far this group goes in the postseason.

Final 4A Rankings for 2015-16:

#1 – Monacan (21-9)

#2 – Lake Taylor (24-5)

#3 – Loudoun Valley (26-1)

#4 – John Champe (23-5)

#5 – GW-Danville (21-8)

#6 – Eastern View (25-2)

#7 – Heritage-Newport News (15-9)

#8 – William Byrd (20-8)

#9 – Smithfield (19-4)

#10 – William Fleming (17-8)

Matthew Hatfield has covered football and basketball since 2004 for VirginiaPreps.com, part of the Rivals.com Network, and is a staff writer for Tar Heel Illustrated. Check out Hatfield’s Twitter page for more sports related updates, and you can also read his work in the Suffolk News Herald. To contact Matthew, please e-mail hatfieldsports2k4@yahoo.com, and don’t forget to listen to him every Saturday at 10 AM on ESPN Radio 94.1, plus watch him on the Cox 11 Sports Report.