Moving students around the school system has been applied in primary and secondary education since formalized schools were created. In modern education, the common and familiar terms are skipping, held back, or left back. Initially, the determination of whether a student would be moved up a grade or designated to repeat a grade was chiefly based on attendance or measures of their academic proficiency in multiple areas.
Today, the term used most often to describe the process is reclassification, and it is no longer chiefly grounded in academics. Reclassification is now entrenched in elementary, middle school, and high school athletics.
Students and parents are choosing this course of action to improve youths’ athletic opportunities and prospects, and financial underpinnings by receiving athletic scholarships and NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals. For the select few, reclassification is part of the calculus of their virtually certain careers as professional athletes. Two notable examples are basketball prodigies Cooper Flagg and AJ Dybantsa.
Flagg, a native of Newport, Maine, starred at Duke this past college basketball season and was the No. 1 overall pick by the Dallas Mavericks in June’s NBA Draft at the age of 18. He was originally scheduled to graduate from high school last May. Instead, in August 2023, he reclassified to the class of 2024.
Dybantsa was in the class of 2026 before it was revealed in October 2023 that he was reclassifying to the class of 2025. The sensational 18-year-old, 6-9 forward from Brockton, Massachusetts, in suburban Boston, will probably be college basketball’s most watched player this season for the Brigham Young Cougars. He is a leading candidate to be the top pick in next June’s NBA Draft. Dybantsa already has NIL deals with, among other brands, Nike and Red Bull that reportedly exceed $10 million.
Why did Flagg and Dybantsa decide to reclassify?
In addition to outgrowing high school competition, their central motivation was to accelerate getting to their second NBA contracts, when each will go from making a total of less than $65 million for four years (Flagg signed a four-year, $62.7 million deal) on their rookie agreements, to extensions likely to approach $300 million by their fifth year in the pros. Both will be younger than 24 when, barring devastating injuries, that scenario is certain to manifest.
By the time he was a high school sophomore, wide receiver Ryan Williams, currently a sophomore at the University of Alabama, was so precocious that in 2022, he was the first 10th-grader ever to be named the prestigious Alabama Mr. Football in one of the country’s hotbeds of the sport. He was awarded the honor again in 2023 as a junior — the state’s only two-time recipient; reclassified from the class of 2025 to 2024; made his college debut last September at the age of 17; and dominated opponents out of the gate, some four and five years older.
However, Flagg, Dybantsa, and Williams are the exceptions. Irrefutable data shows that most high school basketball and football players will never reach Division I (DI) or make it to the NBA and NFL. Roughly 1% of male high school players play DI basketball and it is slightly higher for football at 3%. The NBA? Only 0.03%. The NFL? 0.023%.
Next week:Student-athletes, youth, parents, coaches, and school administrators offer their views on reclassifying.