Orangeville Prep Joins ATLAS: Why Canada's Lone Seat in This New League Is a Big Deal
Canadian basketball just got its own seat at a table that didn't exist a month ago.
This week, a new international prep league called ATLAS, presented by World Stage Sports, announced itself to the world — and tucked inside the eleven founding programs is a name every Maple Minute reader already knows: Orangeville Prep.
Let's start with what ATLAS actually is, because this isn't a glorified showcase circuit. World Stage Sports describes itself as a global sports platform building premium competition, media, and commercial opportunities around the next wave of athletes, and the people running point on this thing aren't rookies.
Mike Morreale, the Canadian sports executive who co-founded and ran the Canadian Elite Basketball League until stepping away last year, is the league's commissioner. The funding is coming from a mix of individuals, venture capital, and private equity, with sponsorship and media rights details still being ironed out.
The format is ambitious. The regular season runs from November 2026 through February 2027, hosted across North America and Europe, before playoffs kick off in March. The schedule opens at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida on November 11th through the 13th with all teams in action, then threads through Daytona Beach, a Florida date in early December, a Miami stop, and a run through Varese, Italy in mid-December. January sends the whole league to Kaunas, Lithuania for a 16-game slate. February brings everyone back to North America — first Geneva, Ohio, then Phoenix — before the championship round lands in Toronto from March 4th through the 7th, where a World Champion gets crowned.
Toronto. Let that sit for a second. The league that's trying to reshape how elite high school basketball operates globally picked a Canadian city to crown its first champion — and that's not a coincidence when you look at who's in the league.
The eleven founding programs are DME Academy, IMG Academy, and Prolific Prep out of Florida, Mega Basket out of Serbia, Orange1 Bassano and Pallacanestro Varese out of Italy, OrangeAcademy Ulm out of Germany, SPIRE out of Ohio, Sunrise Christian out of Kansas, Žalgiris out of Lithuania — and Orangeville Prep out of Ontario. Read that list again.
Orangeville is the only Canadian program in the entire league. The Great White North only got one entry into this thing, and the one that got picked to represent this country is a program that plays its games forty-five minutes outside Toronto.
American ATLAS teams keep their eligibility for the Chipotle Nationals, so this isn't replacing anything for the U.S. programs — it's additive. For Orangeville, it's a direct line into a European and international circuit that Canadian high school basketball simply hasn't had access to before. That matters. For years, the pathway for elite Canadian prospects has run through the States almost by default. ATLAS hands a Canadian program a seat in the same room as Žalgiris and Varese — clubs with real professional pedigree — and does it without requiring a single player to leave the country to find it.
Orangeville Prep isn't walking into this as an unknown.
The program, based at the Athlete Institute campus in Mono, Ontario, has billed itself as Canada's Premier Prep Program for years, with national championships in 2016, 2017, and 2020 to back it up. The headquarters are familiar to anyone who's followed Canadian basketball — this is the building that produced NBA talent before ATLAS ever existed.
The man running the program now is Charles Hantoumakos, head coach of the Orangeville Prep National Men's Team and also the head coach of Canada Basketball's U18 National Team. He's a two-time OSBA champion, and this isn't his first time in that gym — he coached Luguentz Dort through this exact program before taking over as its leader again this season. He coached in this building. Now he leads it. That continuity matters when a program is about to be tested on a stage it's never played on before.
And the roster walking into ATLAS play is one I've been tracking for a while now, because most of these names already live in the Maple Minute database.
Rasheed Morrison, the 2027 wing who made the move to Orangeville, is a dynamic scorer who can get to his spot at all three levels — I sat down with him for a one-on-one interview not long after his move, and the growth in his game since has been obvious.
Praise Badejo is a guard I watched take over stretches of games at the Blue Arrow Classic and again at the Montréal Prep Showcase — explosive, high-IQ, a two-way problem for defenses that still haven't figured out how to load up on him.
Isaiah Lukusa, the 6-foot-6 Canadian wing, already committed to Santa Clara, and anyone who's watched him knows that commitment undersells a kid whose best basketball is still in front of him.
Then there's Lukas Jendrusiak, and I'll be straight with you about this one because I've written about him before and I meant every word of it. I've been going to Orangeville Prep home games for years now. I've seen the team with Lukas Jendrusiak on the floor, and I've seen the team without him. That's not a small distinction. College coaches call me up sometimes, and they almost never ask me if a kid can go left or if he's got a midrange game — they ask about character, about how a player responds when things aren't going his way. Jendrusiak answers that question every single time he steps on the floor.
The roster doesn't stop there. Kyree Taylor and Troy Arthon are part of this group too, and then there's the name that's going to turn heads in every gym this league visits: Jongkuch Mach, the Australian big man who stands 7-foot-6, taller than any active player in the NBA. Add in new signee Christian Cast, the No. 1 recruit in the state of Michigan, and this is a roster with real size and a lot of eyes on it.
That's the core of the roster that's about to represent Canada on a stage that includes Lithuanian and Italian professional academies.
No pressure.
Here's the bigger picture, and it's the part that should matter most to anyone who cares about basketball in this country: ATLAS is a bet that the next generation of elite talent doesn't need to funnel through one country to get developed and seen. For a long time, Canadian basketball has punched above its weight while still operating on the outside of the systems that control access and exposure. This league, by design, put a Canadian program in the room from day one — not as a guest, not as an afterthought, but as one of eleven founding members with a direct path to a championship on Canadian soil.
Orangeville Prep didn't luck into this spot. The results, the coaching pedigree, and the talent pipeline earned it. But now that they're in, the job is to show the rest of this new league — and everyone watching from home — exactly why Canadian basketball deserves to be taken this seriously.
March in Toronto isn't just a championship weekend. It's a chance for a Canadian program to win the first ATLAS title on home floor, in front of the people who've been building toward this for years.
Canadian teams only. That's the energy around this league from where I'm sitting, and Orangeville is the only one that gets to carry that flag. Buckle up.
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