Columnist Steve Carp: Prep Classic manages to stay alive

THE NEWS CAME via the fax machine late in the afternoon. And for a change, the message wasn't bleak.

At least one vestige of the old Las Vegas will remain intact. A little roughed up perhaps, but still as much a part of the local landscape as the 99-cent shrimp cocktail at the Golden Gate downtown and the Follies Bergere at the Tropicana on the Strip.

Save the eulogies for the Reebok Holiday Prep Classic, at least for the time being. Fifty of some the nation's best high school basketball teams will be back in town Dec. 19-23 and for the 22nd straight year, the possession arrow is pointed toward tradition.

You'll see a lot of the big-name schools like Mt. Zion Christian of North Carolina; Oak Hill Academy from Virginia; Westchester, the defending California state champion; and eight Southern Nevada programs.

A few months ago, the fear was the Holiday Prep Classic was going to go the way of the Silver Slipper or the Churchill Downs race and sports book. The tournament had lost a major financial backer in Las Vegas Events and director Jim Allen wasn't sure there would be a tourney this year.

But Reebok stayed loyal, the teams that were invited agreed to take a little less to come out and the show will go on.

Allen, the former Rancho High basketball coach, deserves a tremendous amount of thanks for keeping the Holiday Prep Classic alive. He understands all too well the meaning of tradition and what coming to Las Vegas means to the athletes who compete. To pull the plug over a few bucks would have been wrong.

This isn't like blowing up a casino and putting up a mega-resort. You kill this entity, you don't get a chance to rebuild it -- just like if you lost a sports team and decided three years later to bring it back. There's no way you could recapture the town's loyalty and rebuild the lost momentum built up over the years.

So if it means biting the bullet and not offering as much as in the past, so be it. If you lose a few schools to the big prep tourney in St. Louis, you accept your fate and still attempt to put on a good show.

What's important is that the Holiday Prep Classic live on. Of course, it would be great for the event to prosper and offer enough perks to entice every single prep powerhouse in America. And perhaps things will improve over at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to where its executives can fly first class again and return to supporting the tournament.

But this community needs to maintain and support this event. It's important for the schools which compete and it's more important for the players. Not everyone gets invited to the Nike and Adidas events during the summer, so the high school team may be a kid's lone shot of getting some exposure and maybe earning a scholarship.

It's also important for our local kids to see how they stack up against the rest of the country. Money should never be the determining factor in whether or not they get to exercise that right.

Fortunately, the financial bullet was dodged this time. Next time, we may not be as lucky.

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