Wherever a Jamaican plays, we rank them.
The 2026 Rankings
Eight ranking boards. Two hundred and forty names. One record of Jamaican basketball talent — on the island and everywhere it has travelled.
A boy leaves Montego Bay at fifteen on a prep school scholarship. Four years later he is a senior in Virginia, averaging eighteen a game, and almost nobody in Jamaican basketball knows his name.
That happens every single year. It is the quiet loss at the centre of our sport — talent that leaves the island and falls out of the record, invisible to the national programme, invisible to the community that raised him, and often invisible to the next Jamaican coach who could have helped him.
Nobody has been keeping count. We decided to start.
What we built
The P.H.A.S.E. 1 Academy Jamaica Rankings are three things, and it helps to keep them separate.
RankingsWe've seen you play. Ordered boards, by age, judged on the floor.
ProspectsYou've raised your hand. Registered with film, waiting on evaluation.
PathwayYou're past youth ball. College and pro-track players we track and keep current.
Only the first of those is a ranking. That distinction matters more than anything else on this page, because it is the reason the rankings can be trusted: a player only appears on a board if our staff has evaluated him play. Not on reputation. Not on a highlight reel somebody sent us. On the floor, in a gym, in games we were in the building for or watched on verified broadcast.
Why there are two sets of boards
Look at the list and you'll see Jamaica boards and Global boards at every age group. The split is not about where a player lives. It is about who he has played against.
A player in Kingston and a player in Toronto can't always be ranked against each other, because they haven't always played each other. So we rank both — and where they have met, we rank that too.
The Jamaica boards measure a player against Jamaica-based competition. That is the deepest, most closely watched pool we have, and it is where most of our players live.
The Global boards measure a player against international competition. That pool includes three groups of Jamaicans who have never been counted together before:
Players who migrated
Jamaican-born athletes who left for high school, prep, or junior college abroad. We know many of them because they came through our programmes before they went. We are keeping the file open.
Jamaicans playing abroad
Athletes of Jamaican heritage growing up in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany, playing their youth ball there.
Local players who travelled
This is the part people don't expect. A player based in Jamaica who has competed internationally with our academy or represented Jamaica qualifies for the Global boards too. When we took our teams to the MADE Hoops Middle Games in Springfield, our players spent a week against some of the best age-group competition in the United States. We watched every minute of it. That counts.
To appear on a Global board, a player needs at least three games against non-Jamaica-based opposition inside the ranking window, seen live by our staff or on verified broadcast. It is a specific bar and we apply it the same way to everyone.
The number that tells you the most
Because a local player who has travelled appears on both, some players carry two ranks. It looks like this:
Example card layout
Player Name
Guard · 6'1" · Class of 2029 · Kingston
Evaluated: 14 games live, 5 games international
Those two numbers will not always match, and that is the point. A player can dominate at home and find the international game a different problem. Another can look ordinary in a domestic league and travel extremely well.
The gap between a player's two ranks is the single most useful piece of information a college coach or a national team selector can have about him, and until now nobody has been producing it.
The boards
Board | Who's on it |
Jamaica Boys U15 | Island-based, 12–15. Our deepest pool. |
Jamaica Boys U17 | Island-based. The scholarship-decision years. |
Jamaica Boys U19 | Island-based senior-age players. |
Jamaica Boys Overall | The best in Jamaica, any age. |
Global Boys U15 | Jamaicans worldwide, judged internationally. |
Global Boys U17 | Jamaicans worldwide, judged internationally. |
Global Boys U19 | Jamaicans worldwide, judged internationally. |
Girls Founding Class | Jamaica and global, Senior and Junior tiers. |
Each boys board carries a ranked Top 20 plus ten more players named as On the Radar. We would rather stand behind twenty names completely than pad a list to thirty. As the pool grows, the boards grow with it.
Players from the 2026 evaluation window, at events in Jamaica and the United States.
A word on the girls board
It is short. Twelve names where there should be sixty, across a wide age range, which is why it is grouped into tiers rather than numbered.
Girls founding class photography goes here — replace this block before publishing.
We are not going to dress that up. Girls basketball in Jamaica has been under-resourced for a long time and a thin list is the honest picture of where the game is right now. We are calling it a Founding Class because that is what it is — the first names on a board that is going to get much longer, and it is still open. If you play, register.
Why us
Fair question, and the answer isn't that we're the biggest. It's that we are in the specific position this job requires.
We're in the gyms. Not scrolling film. Our staff runs leagues and academy programmes across the island and sees these players in competition through the year, repeatedly, over seasons. Evaluation is a by-product of work we already do.
We travel. Springfield, Philadelphia, and events across North America. That is how the Global boards became possible — we have watched Jamaican players against international competition with our own eyes, not read about it.
We already have the relationships abroad. The players who migrated came through our programmes before they left. We can pick up the phone. Nobody else has that file.
We publish our method. Who evaluated, how many viewings, live or broadcast, and how a name arrived on the list. Where we have a conflict — and we do, because some ranked players train with us — we say so and we bring in coaches from outside our programme onto the panel.
And we're not gatekeeping it. You do not have to be a P.H.A.S.E. 1 player to be ranked. Our staff adds any player we have properly evaluated, from any programme, anywhere. A list that only ranked our own athletes would be a customer list, and it would be worth nothing to anybody.
What this is for
A ranking that only produces arguments is a waste of everyone's time. This one has a job.
For players and families — a public, verifiable record of where you stand, and a name college and prep programmes can actually find. If you are outside Jamaica, it is a way back into the conversation at home.
For the national programme — the pool, written down. Every Jamaica-eligible youth player we can identify, where they are, what level they play at, and when they migrated. Selectors have been working without this.
For coaches abroad — one place to look, instead of five countries of guesswork.
For the game here — proof that a kid from a parish league can be seen, ranked, and followed all the way to a college roster. Every name on the Pathway list is that argument made in public.
Next July, P.H.A.S.E. 1 Academy returns to men's competition at a global club event in the United States, taking a roster of players nineteen and over. Every player on the Pathway list is in consideration. That is where this leads: not a list for its own sake, but a line that runs from a twelve-year-old in a parish gym to a Jamaican on a floor in front of the world.
Get in the system
Register with a highlight video to be evaluated for the 2026 boards. Players abroad, players who migrated, and players from any programme in Jamaica are all welcome. You do not need to train with us to be ranked.
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