Link Academy basketball wows Springfield crowd before taking Tournament of Champions stage

Missing a handful of players to illness and minor injuries, Link Academy found itself only up by six with less than three minutes left in its Thursday night Ozark Mountain Shootout appearance at Glendale High School.

A roster full of four- and five-star recruits bound for the biggest colleges in the country had impressed throughout with their high-flying abilities and, at times, moved the ball in a way that was reminiscent of the Harlem Globetrotters.

But they needed a few buckets late to contain Mansfield Legacy, one of the top teams at the highest class in Texas, which was shooting lights out from beyond the arc. The Lions needed to show why they were ranked as one of the top five high school basketball teams in the nation.

A few lobs to LSU signee Corey Chest paired with a few ridiculous blocks later, the Lions came away with a 66-58 victory in one of the Branson program's few stops in the Queen City this season.

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"This has been great," first-year head coach Bill Armstrong said. "The people at Link are unbelievable and coaching this group of guys ... it's a joy to get up and go to work every day."

Armstrong took over a Link Academy program that finished as the runners-up at the GEICO Nationals last season when the Lions were in their inaugural year. After several years of having prep-school programs on the Kanakuk campus in Branson, the high school team was created and skyrocketed to become among the nation's best.

The inaugural roster featured the likes of five-star recruits Omaha Biliew (Iowa State), Jordan Walsh (Arkansas) and Julian Phillips (Tennessee) among others. It went 34-2 under then-head coach Rodney Perry, now an assistant at Kansas State, and came up 11 points shy in the national championship.

For the program's encore, it hired Armstrong, a former LSU assistant, following Perry's departure and he had to replace every player on the roster but one. He constructed a team that includes seven players ranked in 247Sports' Top 100 players across the next three classes with the roster headlined by five-star 2024 point guard prospect Elliot Cadeau.

More:Who is on the Link Academy high school basketball roster in 2022-23?

"It's what I've done for the last 20 years, is recruiting," said Armstrong, who took the job because he wanted an opportunity to be a head coach. "It wasn't anything new to me. That's what I enjoy and putting together a team and then helping them get to where they want to go."

Where the Lions want to go is back to the GEICO Nationals to finish the job, despite the roster being almost entirely different than the one from a season ago. Tennessee signee Cameron Carr, the son of Drury assistant Chris Carr, is the lone returner.

Those who could make the trip on Thursday showcased what made them special. Chest threw down dunk after dunk along with Oklahoma signee Jacolb Cole. Carr scored seven of his 16 points in the fourth quarter with 2025 top-15 standouts BJ Davis-Ray and Aaron Rowe showing why they're already regarded as two of the best in the country.

"I wish people could see the commitment and effort and hard work that these guys put in," Armstrong said. "You see their talent and they get to display that on game day. But it's about how hard they work every day and you'll know why they're so good and why they're where they are and why they're going where they're going. These guys work every single day, sometimes two or three times a day."

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The remainder of Link Academy's season will take it all over the country with high-level showcases and tournaments in New York City, Phoenix and others with the hopes of qualifying, again, for the national tournament at the end of March leading into early April.

It won't go without a few more appearances in the Springfield area. The Lions play Saturday night in the inaugural "48 Hours of Basketball" event at Greenwood at 8 p.m. They will also play Class 5 Pembroke Hill in Bolivar on Jan. 7.

In mid-January, Link Academy will make its debut in the tournament it was seemingly created to play in — the Bass Pro Tournament of Champions. The Lions will be the showcase team on Springfield's biggest stage and have the opportunity to play more top-tier programs including Sunrise Christian and Christ the King.

"I'm excited about it," Armstrong said. "It's one of the best high school tournaments in the country and we're excited about the opportunity to play and are excited about the competition. We're gonna come out and give it everything we've got and try to win it."

Wyatt D. Wheeler is a reporter and columnist with the Springfield News-Leader. You can contact him at 417-371-6987, by email at wwheeler@news-leader.com or Twitter at @WyattWheeler_NL. He's also the co-host of Sports Talk on Jock Radio weekdays from 4-6 p.m.