The names leap from the hardwood: Willie Naulls, Gail Goodrich, Marques Johnson, Paul Pierce, Baron Davis, Tyson Chandler, James Harden, Kawhi Leonard, Paul Pierce, DeMar DeRozan, Jrue Holiday. That’s a fair sample of the greatest basketball players to come from Southland high schools. Rob Dillingham could join them, with a prominent asterisk.
The exceptionally quick guard from Kentucky is expected to be a lottery pick in the NBA draft Wednesday. Yet even the most rabid followers of high school hoops could be excused for not recognizing Dillingham’s connection to the greater Los Angeles area. He’s not a local in the traditional sense, such as Jared McCain — the Times Player of the Year in 2023 with Corona Centennial High .
McCain, who spent one year at Duke, is expected to be taken in the middle of the first round. But Dillingham? He was the marquee player at the Donda Academy , the short-lived basketball mill and K-12 private Christian school owned and operated by rapper Ye — formerly Kanye West . Donda, named after Ye’s mother, opened in the fall of 2021 in Simi Valley, then moved to an industrial park in Chatsworth before closing early in 2023.
Donda parents, faculty and staff were required to sign a nondisclosure agreement and refrain from publicly discussing the school’s practices and any other details that were not public. “People choose to bring their kids to Donda Academy for a sense of privacy,” Malik Yusef, a producer and longtime collaborator of Y.