For one high school season, Emanuel Sharp and Dillon Mitchell played for the same team. On June 24, after taking opposite routes through college basketball, they reached the NBA within five picks of each other.
The Sacramento Kings drafted Sharp, a guard from Houston, at No. 45 in the second round. Boston had taken Mitchell, a forward from St. John’s, at No. 40 a few minutes earlier. Both were juniors on the 2020-21 Bishop McLaughlin team that reached the Florida Class 3A final — a team with no obvious reason to be that good.
The Hurricanes had won two games the season before. Then Derrick Sharp, a former Maccabi Tel Aviv guard, took over the program and brought his son Emanuel, a transfer from Blake. Mitchell followed from Sickles. Three more starters transferred in. Suddenly stacked with juniors holding Division I offers, Bishop McLaughlin lost in the state final to Calvary Christian and put together one of the best seasons the area had seen in years.
“It was great that we could all come here and make a difference,” Sharp said that spring.
Then they scattered.
Mitchell left for Montverde Academy, won a national title and arrived at Texas in 2022 as a five-star recruit and a projected one-and-done. It didn’t go that way. He withdrew from the 2023 draft, played a second season at Texas, transferred to Cincinnati, then to St. John’s. By his final year under Rick Pitino, he had rebuilt his game around defense, earning All-Big East honors on a 6-foot-8 frame that can guard four positions. He averaged 8.3 points, 7.0 rebounds and 3.0 assists.
Sharp had a more painful path. Two months after the state final, he broke his fibula and dislocated his ankle in a pickup game. Some schools pulled their offers. Houston didn’t, and he enrolled early to rehab with the Cougars. He stayed five years, reached the 2025 national championship game and left as a first-team All-Big 12 pick who averaged 15.5 points as a senior.
Four years and three schools for one. Five years and one school for the other. Same ending.
Their connection runs back further than Bishop McLaughlin. They played AAU together for Each 1 Teach 1, where the 6-3 Sharp spent plenty of time finding Mitchell above the rim.
“If you see my teammate Dillon Mitchell, I’m throwing him lobs all game,” Sharp once said.
On June 24, for the first time since that season in Spring Hill, they were on the same stage again.