Mt Zion Prep (MD) Shifts Away From Post Grad Players
Mount Zion Preparatory Academy is a STEAM-focused private day and boarding school in Lanham, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., with programs for domestic and international boarding students. Its story began in 2012, when Mt. Zion Prep launched as a postgraduate basketball program, giving players an extra year to develop their game and their grades before college. In 2019 the program added a high school team and curriculum.
Through that growth, the basketball stayed rooted in postgraduate development, with the Prep National program giving postgrad athletes college exposure and a year to develop. This season brings a big change: Mt Zion is not rostering any postgrads. Its roster is made up entirely of high school players, which makes the team eligible for national-level high school events. At the same time, it will remain a member of the Elite Prep League (EPL), one of the top college prep leagues in the country. That makes Mt Zion one of the more interesting programs to track this season: a high school roster playing a significant number of games against the nation’s top postgrad and prep programs.
The program has a long record of producing college players, with alumni at schools including UConn, FIU, Southern Mississippi, NC A&T, UMBC and Delaware State. Last season the Warriors finished No. 15 in the national prep computer rankings, second-best in the EPL behind only Hargrave, and went 7-4 against a league slate that’s as deep as any in prep basketball. For high school players, a schedule like that is rare: a full season of playing with and against future college players, often a year or more older, so they will eventually land on a college team already experienced in playing against older players.
The team is led by head coach Rodrick Harrison, an energetic, guard-focused coach with relationships with college programs around the country. A Baltimore basketball product, Harrison won three state championships as a player at Baltimore’s Paul Laurence Dunbar High, where his senior team was ranked No. 7 nationally by USA Today. He went on to earn second-team All-Region honors at Catonsville Community College, then start at UMBC, where he was team MVP in 1998-99 and helped the Retrievers win the 1999 Northeast Conference title. Harrison returned to Dunbar as an assistant from 2009 to 2012, a span that brought three more state titles, and coached Under Armour’s B’More Panthers AAU team, sending players to Division I programs such as Loyola and UNLV. He’s joined by associate head coach Brian Scott, who has been with Mt Zion since the program’s first season in 2012. A former Baltimore Poly standout, Scott averaged 15.5 points over two seasons at Catonsville and helped Barton College win the 1996-97 CVAC title and reach its first NCAA Division II tournament. He was also an assistant at Dunbar during its title run and served as college recruiting coordinator for Team Thrill AAU.
The Mt Zion Prep 2026-27 season players are profiled below.
(to come)
Click here for the team’s 2026-27 game schedule and results.