Matt Brown, a Barrington High School sophomore, is set to showcase his skills in basketball and football at a prep school in Massachusetts next year.

The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach

BARRINGTON — I grew up in a time when the best athletes often played three sports, moving through the seasons with the changing of equipment, a time when each season was almost sacred.

It was the late ’50s and the symbolic representative of this was Chip Hilton, the fictional character created by Clair Bee, who was the quarterback in football, the high scorer in basketball, the pitcher in baseball, the classic high school hero. Everyone wanted to be Chip Hilton then.

Matt Brown actually is.

He is a sophomore at Barrington High School, and to say he is a great high school athlete is an understatement. Last year, as a freshman no less, he was a two-way starter and also ran back kicks on a football team that won the Division I state championship. Then he went to basketball, where he averaged about 20 points a game, immediately establishing himself as one of the elite young players in the state, routinely up around the rim at 6-foot-2. In the spring, he ran track, even though he also wanted to play baseball, too.

But this is not the late ’50s, and Chip Hilton doesn’t live here anymore.

All I ever wanted to do as a kid was to play for the my Barrington High team. Not to one day play in college. Not to one day maybe be a pro. Play on my high school team with the kids I had grown up with. That was my sports dream.

Nor do I think I was particularly unique back then. That was our sports world then, small, insular. Our team. Our league. Riding on the school bus to away games, playing in packed high school gyms, trying to win championships. No travel teams. No AAU. No culture telling you that if you don’t get a scholarship one day that you’ve somehow failed. To this day, I wouldn’t trade a minute of it.

That is not Brown’s world.

Not anymore anyway, even if it ever was.

Next year he is leaving Barrington High to go to Northfield- Mt. Herman, a Massachusetts prep school.

“I’m going for more opportunity,” he says one afternoon last week, sitting in the high school cafeteria wearing a blue and gold state championship jacket, a 2007 version of Chip Hilton.

It’s not an easy decision. He has lived here since he was 6 and his father, former Providence College basketball player Donnie Brown, came to Barrington to be the high school coach. He grew up going to his father’s games, practices. He gets along with everybody. He came of age playing in all the local leagues. This is what is familiar, comfortable. This is home.

He just doesn’t feel he has a choice, that if he’s ever going to get where he’s trying to get as an athlete he has to go someplace where the competition is better.

He’s not alone. This started in hockey in Rhode Island about a decade ago, maybe more, an exodus out of the Interscholastic League by some of the more talented players. Now it’s happening in basketball. Ben Crenca, a star at Exeter/West Greenwich last year as a sophomore, is now at Worcester Academy. South Kingstown’s Erik Murphy, already a big-time recruit as a sophomore, is at St. Mark’s. And that’s not even counting St. Andrew’s, which has several Rhode Island kids on its roster.

Brown’s sports life started to get complicated when he was 11. Until then, he played all sports, liked baseball the best. But he started playing AAU basketball and soon learned that it was an incredible time commitment. Two years later, he was playing basketball all year round, squeezing in football and baseball. He’s already an AAU veteran, having played for six teams, here and in Boston, part of this state’s basketball subculture, the one that tells you that if you’re not doing this year-round someone else is

“I’ve always known that this is what it takes,” he says.

This is said matter-of-factly, just the way it is.

As is the fact that prep school basketball and the basketball played in the Interscholastic League might as well be played in parallel universes. Brown knows this, too. He has been to prep school tournaments. He has been across the street to games at St. Andrew’s. He knows that the New England prep schools are full of talent in ways the Interscholastic League can never be.

“I knew I had to do this sooner or later,” Matt Brown says.

He also got hurt this year, a knee injury in his first football game of the year. Surgery. Crutches for six weeks. Still rehabbing it. Did it hasten his decision to leave Barrington, the realization that all this can go in an instant, that the brass ring isn’t out there forever.

“We tossed and turned about it,” says Donnie Brown. “For once he goes away next fall that’s it, everything changed. And we’ve really been thinking about this for a year and a half now.”

For what do you with a gift? Do you ignore it, or give it room to grow? Do you continue to play in a high school league you dominated when you were in the ninth grade, or do you take your potential to a bigger stage?

Matt Brown plans to play both football and basketball at Northfield- Mt. Herman, for he doesn’t want to choose yet. He still clings to the belief he can do both, at least for a little while longer, as if this is still some lost era, back when the great high school athletes moved through the seasons, back before it got so complicated.

So in a sense Chip Hilton still lives. Even if he doesn’t live around here anymore.

breynold@projo.com