North Laurel’s Reed Sheppard staying grounded while taking flight
At first glance, North Laurel’s Reed Sheppard looks like any other athletic high school basketball player.
And then the whistle blows.
Suddenly, he’s more athletic than he first appeared. He’s quicker. He jumps higher than it seems he should be able to. He can handle it. He can steal it. He can dunk it. He draws multiple defenders and then makes opponents pay by finding open teammates, often with passes that border on the spectacular.
“It’s awesome,” North Laurel’s Brody Brock said of his friend. “He’s the best teammate I’ve ever had.”
Sheppard is anything but a typical 6-foot-2 sophomore. That could be because he’s the son of two University of Kentucky basketball standouts, Jeff Sheppard and Stacey Reed Sheppard.
It also has a lot to do with his North Laurel teammates, a group of 10 sophomores, three juniors and a now-injured senior who also look like many other Kentucky high school players — until the whistle blows.
They cut. They share. They catch. They finish. Their crisp passes swing around the court precisely with devastating effects.
In their 82-58 win over Madison Southern on Tuesday night, they looked like a team rated No. 4 by The Associated Press and No. 6 by Dave Cantrall — maybe even better — because they didn’t think they played all that well and still won by 24.
Four North Laurel (8-0) players scored in double figures, led by Brock’s 20 that included five of the team’s 13 three-pointers.
“Yeah, that’s what we do,” said Coach Nate Valentine. “All the rankings and stuff when people talk about us being, I mean, I see crazy stuff on Twitter, and I don’t know if we’re one of the better teams in the state, or not, … but we’ve got a lot of guys that are unselfish, that love to play basketball. And they’ll share the ball, and they don’t care who scores.”
Sheppard turned heads last season when he notched a “quadruple double” — 24 points, 10 rebounds, 14 assists and 10 steals — against Jackson County. He turned more heads this season when he hung 45 points on No. 3 Covington Catholic in a victory that vaulted the Jaguars into the top 10.
In eight games, Sheppard is averaging better than 31 points per game and leading the team in rebounds with eight per.
Against Madison Southern, Sheppard scored just 17 points, but he also grabbed 10 rebounds, dished out 13 assists, had seven steals and three blocks.
“And he’s as happy as anybody on the team. ... He’s unique. He really is,” Valentine said of Sheppard’s unselfishness and demeanor.
A first-half steal led to a breakaway dunk attempt that Sheppard flubbed, clanging the ball into the side of the rim instead of down and through. But the Madison Southern defender mishandled the rebound and the ball quickly fell back to Sheppard, who then turned an embarrassing moment into a bucket and a foul for a three-point play.
Sheppard shrugged off the gaffe in the postgame interview just like he did in the game.
“You just don’t worry about it, just keep playing, really,” Sheppard said. “Everybody misses one every once in a while. I mean, that’s embarrassing, but you just gotta keep going.”
In the second half, Reed got another steal and broke away for an emphatic dunk he made sure he sized up correctly.
Such plays and his penchant for high-scoring games send social media aflutter with talk of his potential and the potential for where he might eventually play in college even though he still has more than two years of high school remaining. He recently garnered his first Power Five offer from Iowa.
But Valentine sees a player who’s been doing a good job ignoring such distractions.
“Now, you see everything on Twitter, you can’t control that, but we just keep coaching him hard and (help him) keep getting better,” Valentine said. “He’s had a really good season, so far. But he’s got a lot of areas to improve on, you know. He’s got a long way to go to get to where he wants to be. He’s got a pretty good support system that keeps him grounded.”
Sheppard’s parents each had their share of fanfare as high school players, but certainly not with the everyday immediacy of today’s technological age.
“Mom and Dad are really good about it,” Sheppard said. “They tell me all the time, ‘Don’t even worry about it.’ I mean, I’m going to see it, of course, because it’s there. But they say, ‘Don’t worry about anything that (social media) says good or bad — just you do you.’”
Highlights
This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 8:24 AM.
