Tucked away in an isolated strip of West Camp Wisdom Road in Dallas sits a burgeoning basketball powerhouse.
But walk inside Kingdom Collegiate Academy, and you’ll see plenty of signs showing why the Christian private school has been able to attract high-profile girls basketball recruits as transfers in its first year with a team.
Banners outside the gymnasium read “Walk by faith” and “God is with you in your wilderness.” A sign near the entrance to the school lists what it has to offer, and just after “Dual credit courses and advanced college offerings” and “15:1 student-teacher ratio” it says “Nurturing Christian learning environment.”
As she prepared to sign with Texas Tech last week, four-star point guard Gianna Jordan talked about why she left Oak Cliff Faith Family — a charter school that played in the prestigious Chipotle Nationals last year — for an obscure academy that has about 500 students ranging from 18 months old through 12th grade.
High School Sports
“It’s how much they love God,” she said. “It really grew me closer to him. They read their Bible every day, we do Bible study in every class. It’s great to be able to grow closer to God.”
The chance to grow their faith, play a national schedule against better competition, prepare for the rigors of college athletics and have more time to work with trainers and coaches have led nationally ranked area recruits to give up their dreams of chasing UIL state championships with longtime friends in their hometowns. The elite players have instead chosen to attend prep, private or public schools, dramatically changing the landscape for girls basketball in North Texas over the last few years.
Kingdom Collegiate Academy is the latest nontraditional school to emerge, following in the footsteps of Faith Family and Irving-based Legion Prep Academy.
“You are basically signing up for a college experience,” said Haskell Abii, whose daughter Jacy is the state’s No. 1 recruit in the Class of 2026 and has spent her last two years of high school at Legion Prep. “If your child is not trying to play college ball, I get staying at a regular school. But if she is trying to go play college ball, I don’t think you can make a better decision.”
An unconventional path
Traveling to compete against elite teams and four- and five-star recruits as part of a national schedule, like Legion Prep did this month in Toronto, isn’t all that sets the schools apart.
Legion Prep’s new head coach, Del’Vin Dickerson, and director of operations Irving Roland have experience working with NBA, WNBA and Division I athletes, while players work on injury prevention and body maintenance with Ursula Heyner, who has trained NFL stars such as Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase and Atlanta Falcons running back Bijan Robinson, along with other pro athletes.
“She gets world-class training every day,” Haskell said of his daughter. “The people that work on her body at Legion are world class. Pros travel into Texas to work with the young ladies that work with my daughter. She didn’t have access to this at Frisco [Liberty].”
That was crucial for Abii, the nation’s ninth-ranked player, as she was coming off a torn ACL that forced her to miss last season.
The path might seem unconventional, and there are risks involved for players and their families, especially with a KCA program just getting started and given the situation at Faith Family, which is facing potential closure at the end of the school year after receiving an F on the Texas Education Agency’s academic accountability ratings each of the last three years.
Five girls basketball players transferred to KCA from Faith Family for this season, including four-star senior Amari Byles, the nation’s 37th-ranked recruit.
“I’m a relationship person, and when I talked to them, I always felt like they were my family,” Byles said of KCA. “This school, in general, is a Christian school, and the faith aspect of it has helped me grow as a person.”
Parents of new Kingdom Collegiate Academy students say they have embraced the school’s vision.
“I just felt like it was the right move for her growth and development as a player,” said Byles’ father, Maushae. “I wanted to put her in more of a leadership role, a place where she can not only grow mentally, but spiritually. The fact that everything was on campus [for classes] and they had a lot of AP courses, she is a highly touted student, a 5.0 GPA kid, so we wanted to make sure she was in a great academic situation, too.”
Kingdom Collegiate Academy had five girls sign to play college basketball last Wednesday, with Byles signing with Notre Dame, sisters Gianna, Natalia and Milania Jordan signing with Texas Tech and Cora Bennett signing with Grand Canyon University.
All used to be stars at UIL schools — Byles at DeSoto, the Jordan sisters at Southlake Carroll and Bennett at Converse Judson — but it was just a year ago that Byles and the Jordan sisters were among 18 transfers to Faith Family that led to the then-UIL member receiving severe punishments from the state’s governing body for public school athletics.
Faith Family’s crisis
Last October, the UIL suspended Faith Family girls basketball head coach Andrea Robinson and assistant coaches Kadi Creel and Jordan Jones from all UIL activities for two years for recruiting violations.
The charter school was also banned from the 2024-25 postseason after being found guilty of the recruiting violations, a lack of transparency and withholding information, but Faith Family left the UIL a week later so it could play a national schedule.
The school is facing crippling academic problems, and Texas has a “three strikes” law that says the agency will automatically shut down a charter school district that receives three straight F ratings, either for academic or financial reasons.
Faith Family superintendent Mollie Purcell Mozley and athletic director Marcus Canonico did not respond to messages seeking comment, but the school appealed its 2025 rating and will find out the results of the TEA’s review in December, during basketball season.
Its boys team is ranked No. 23 in the ESPN preseason national rankings, and the girls team has four-star Washington signee Amayah Garcia, rated the 46th-best player in the nation in the Class of 2026.
College prep work
This season, only two of Texas’ eight nationally ranked girls basketball recruits in the Class of 2026 will play at UIL schools, with five-star Duke signee Bella Flemings at San Antonio Brennan and four-star Texas Tech signee Ambrosia Cole at defending Class 5A Division II state champion Lubbock Monterey.
Legion Prep’s roster this season includes three of the top 44 recruits in the nation in the Class of 2026 — five-star Notre Dame signee Abii, four-star North Carolina State signee Kamora Pruitt and four-star Texas A&M signee Rieyan DeSouze — and the team is No. 11 in the ESPN preseason national rankings. The only other Texas team in the rankings is Kingdom Collegiate Academy at No. 14.
Pruitt and DeSouze were part of DeSoto’s Class 6A state runner-up team as freshmen in 2023, and Abii led Frisco Liberty to back-to-back Class 5A state titles her first two years of high school.
Haskell Abii had two sons who attended Liberty before going on to play college basketball, but he thought his daughter needed a different approach to fulfill her dream of playing professionally.
Out-of-state schools called to see if Abii would be interested in transferring while she was at Liberty, and he said he considered Florida’s Montverde Academy and IMG Academy before deciding on Legion Prep, which opened in 2018 and started its girls basketball program for the 2023-24 season.
“If I had known it would be this great for an athlete like her, I probably would have done it her freshman year, although that’s hard for me to say because she had a phenomenal experience at Liberty,” Haskell said. “I said, we’ve got to make sure she’s not just ready academically, we’ve got to make sure that in practice she is working out against girls that are trying to do what she’s trying to do, so when Notre Dame says we need you to get a lot of minutes and we need you to possibly start, she’s not shell shocked. She’s like, ‘Oh, I’m ready. I’ve been playing four- and five-star girls the last two years at Legion.’”
Classes at Legion used to be all online, and students worked at their own pace before the school opened a physical location in Irving where students attend in person. Abii spends two days a week at the school and two days taking college prep courses at Collin College.
Not a passing fad
Fellowship Christian Academy started in Oak Cliff in the 1980s and became Kingdom Collegiate Academy for the 2019-20 school year. KCA students attend classes at the school’s DeSoto campus, and the girls basketball team practices and plays games at the Dallas campus.
Highly touted sophomore Syniyah Grigsby, who averaged 21.5 points and 11.9 rebounds for North Mesquite last season, is also now at Kingdom Collegiate Academy.
How did this private school attract these players to build a powerhouse so quickly?
“I would say trust and vision,” girls basketball coach Chris Smith Jr. said. “I’m from the Dallas area, and a lot of the players I’ve known since they were young. When they knew that I took the position here, they were interested in the school and what I was potentially building.”
Kingdom Collegiate Academy could have tried to join TAPPS but chose to play in the Texas Christian Athletic League, an organization that included Legion Prep and Faith Family last season. That will allow Kingdom to play in tournaments in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Florida and New York.
“We had the ability to choose which one, and we knew the level of talent that was coming to our school,” Smith said. “TAPPS wouldn’t allow us to play a national schedule, so that is why we chose TCAL.”
Smith, the son of former NBA player Chris Smith Sr., said he thinks more schools like his will start playing national schedules to entice top players with an opportunity most public schools can’t provide. He also thinks Kingdom Collegiate Academy is here to stay as a national powerhouse because of what it offers.
“We are a Christian private school, so I think families are looking for the opportunity to be covered with faith,” he said. “Because we are a private school, and with the league we are in, we are able to play against better competition outside of the state of Texas, which is appealing to some families. And for us, as a private school, we get higher education, so we’re maximizing athletics, as well as education.”
On X: @DMNGregRiddle
Previews and predictions for notable Dallas-area area round playoff football games
Rockwall-Heath takes on Duncanville in a marquee matchup between two of North Texas’ best teams this season.
Predictions for 30 area round Texas high school football playoff games
We’ll be predicting outcomes for Texas high school football games throughout the playoffs.
Fresh off giving birth to twins, Byron Nelson’s Brianne Groth will coach in title game
Brianne Groth, who had twin girls earlier this month, will return to the sideline for the Class 6A Division I state final after missing multiple playoff matches.
Find more high school sports coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.