The basketball story that journalist Keith O’Brien found in Scott County, Ky., takes place in a high school “where all too often students didn’t want to learn and teachers didn’t want to teach,’’ a place where “reading a book seemed like an especially difficult thing to ask of’’ students.

Perhaps that wouldn’t matter so much if all the players were good enough to secure lucrative pro basketball contracts, but they aren’t. A few are good enough to win the opportunity to play in college, but in the epilogue to “Outside Shot,’’ we learn that most of those boys left campus shortly after arriving, either because they were unprepared for the academic challenge, or because they didn’t turn out to be as good as recruiters hoped, or because they got homesick.