South Kingstown’s Erik Murphy, who is headed to Florida this fall, has been playing prep-school basketball at St. Mark’s for four seasons. His younger brother, Alex, below, also plays for St. Mark’s.

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The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

Way back in what now seems like another life, I spent a year in prep school.

The school was Worcester Academy, a school that every year took several kids who already had graduated from high school. Many of them were athletes. I was one of them. And at the end of the year I was accepted at Brown, a school I never would have gotten into in a million lifetimes coming out of high school.

What I didn’t know was that I was a trailblazer.

It is over 40 years later, and college basketball players are now coming out of New England as if on some huge assembly line. Consider this stat: Take away Jason Francis, who grew up in Jamaica and came to URI from a junior college, and nine out of the 11 Rams all went to prep school in New England.

Ponder that stat for a while.

Nine out of 11.

This is not an aberration.

Five of the current Friars came out of New England prep schools, and you don’t have to search too far to see New England prep school products all over college basketball.

And the three best Rhode Island schoolboy prospects — Mike Marra of Smithfield and Erik and Alex Murphy of South Kingstown — are all in New England prep schools, Marra and Erik Murphy next year going to Louisville and Florida, respectively.

What to make of this?

What better person to talk to than Ed Reilly, the Worcester Academy coach who once starred for La Salle and coached at Bryant. He has been at Worcester for six years how, coached both Jimmy Baron and Mark McAndrew, and has sent nearly 40 players to college basketball in those six years.

“There are about 20 prep schools in New England who are all doing this to some degree,” he says. “And the kids don’t come from New England. They come from all over the country, all over the world.”

So how did this happen?

One of the pioneers was Dee Rowe, who coached me at Worcester Academy and went on to coach at the University of Connecticut. When he first began coaching there, Worcester used sports as a way to compete with the more prestigious New England prep schools, the Andovers and Exeters of the world.

Worcester Academy was never an elite prep school, even though we wore jackets and ties every day and had mandatory study halls, a far cry from my high school experience, when I rarely could find my books, never mind read them. It was an urban school, dating back to the late 19th century, and had a disparate alumni that included 1960s radical Abbie Hoffman and renowned baseball flake Mark “The Bird” Fidrych.

But every year it would take several post-graduates, usually in basketball and football, and play a schedule that included other prep schools and college freshman teams. This coincided with the likes of Exeter, which routinely would take football and hockey players from around Boston for a post-graduate year, give them a little academic polish and transport them to Harvard and other Ivies.

“Dee was kind of like the founding father of all this,” Reilly says. “And it was a tremendous advantage for a kid. By the time he went off to college, he was a year older and had played a year of excellent competition.”

Worcester won its first New England basketball title in 1955, and has won 14 more since then. In the last decade or so, it has routinely sent kids to the college basketball ranks, even though its roster is now essentially split between post-graduates and high school kids.

“Kids come from everywhere,” says Reilly, “and we don’t have to recruit them. They recruit us. And it’s primarily a New England phenomenon. No other part of the country is doing this the way we are.”

The big change in the last decade or so is the number of schools that now try to attract students in a variety of sports. Schools also use it to add diversity to their campuses; kids, many of whom get some kind of financial aid, use it to become more attractive to colleges, both athletically and academically.

Marra is in his second year at Northfield-Mt. Hermon. Matt Brown, an outstanding two-sport star from Barrington, is on schedule to be at Northfield- Mt. Hermon for three years. This is Erik Murphy’s fourth year at St. Mark’s, and his brother, Alex, is scheduled to be there for four years, too.

St. Andrew’s, a Barrington prep school that’s always sending kids off to college basketball, wants kids for more than one year.

That’s the new trend.

“Prep school is a major lure for lower-income kids,” Reilly says. “And by the time they leave here they are college ready, both athletically and academically.”

He has two Rhode Islanders on this year’s team, Sam Martin from West Warwick and Ben Crenca, who once went to Exeter-West Greenwich High School. Crenca is headed to Vermont next year, Martin to Yale.

Would they be going to these places if they didn’t go to prep school? Who knows?

There’s no question, though, that they got more exposure in prep school, where college scouts routinely attend preseason practices, never mind games.

That’s not going to happen at West Warwick or Exeter-West Greenwich high schools.

That’s just the way it is.

So expect this trend to continue. More kids making decisions based on their futures at a younger age. More kids going off to prep schools. More kids coming into college basketball from New England prep schools.

Why?

Because it works.

Something I first discovered a long time ago.

breynold@projo.com