Last New Year's Eve, Rodney Hill was in Starkville, Miss., preparing his gameplan for Mississippi State as an assistant coach at Auburn. Hill got a call from Raegan Pebley, his former head coach at TCU and the current general manager of the Los Angeles Sparks.
Pebley had heard from a friend who had been a consultant with the two of them at TCU in 2022-23. That friend was looking to assemble a basketball program as part of the ambitious, new, "IMG Academy of the North" Masters Academy International (MAI) in Stow, Mass. His name is well-known in New England: John Carroll.
"When John called me, John asked, 'Hey, what have you heard about the opportunity?'" Hill recalled. "I literally told John not much. I just trusted Raegan and I trusted him, and I was open to hearing more about it. John flew me out to Boston to see it, and the rest is history."
The "history" is still to be written. MAI creeps toward its first day of the 2026-27 school year, and Hill is tasked with putting the girls basketball program in spaces no New England school has gone before.
RIPPLE EFFECT: How could MAI affect the New England basketball landscape?
