|
Quote
|
One day a peacock, the next day a feather duster
-- Joe Lapchick/Lou Carnesecca |
|
|
Who's Online
|
We have 102 guests and 1 member online
You are an anonymous user. You can register for free by clicking here
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Chasing the city's top eighth grader
Malcolm Pope Jr. already a hot prospect
By KRISTIE ACKERT
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Malcolm Pope Jr. is tired and thirsty. He walks out of the gym at the Fashion Institute of Technology with his friends and heads toward the soda machine. His father trails behind, looking through his son's bag to make sure they have everything before they leave. He's too slow.
Before they can reach the machines, two assistant basketball coaches converge on
Pope and his son. The father sighs and his son shrugs: It's going to be another 20 minutes before they can make their escape.
Coaches from three schools have made recruiting pitches on this night, all trying desperately to befriend the father and sound brotherly to the son.
"I wish that he would pick a school and just be in the school and this would all be over," says Pope Sr. "It's crazy. The coaches call and come over and want to talk to you at games. If choosing a college is anything like this, I can see why some parents let their kids go straight to the league."
But Malcolm Pope Jr. is no high school senior headed for college or the NBA. He is an eighth grader who is 13-years-old. The recruiters that he has talked to almost every week since he was 12 are high school coaches; he has been on the coaching radar screen since he was in the fifth grade.
"I thought that maybe it wouldn't happen until he was at least in high school," says Neshareon Moore, Pope's mother. "I thought it's a little young for all this right now."
It's apparently never too young when your son has a quick cross-over dribble and is known as the best defensive guard of his grade. Pope plays at Abyssinian Church's AAU program with Justin Rivers, a 6-3 bruiser with a soft touch and good ballhandling skills. Pope, Rivers and a few other young New York City players are in the middle of a recruiting war that by all official accounts should not exist. The PSAL does not allow high schools to recruit players. Neither does the CHSAA.
"Well it happens," says one high school coach who asks to remain anonymous. "You start hearing about kids in junior high school. If their parents don't come out and say they want to go to a Rice or a Lincoln, then coaches can start hounding them. It's pretty common."
Last Saturday night at the Real Scout Invitational eighth-grade all-star game at FIT, the recruiters were hardly inconspicuous. Pope, who has been known in basketball circles as "Snoop" since he was 4, and Rivers joined 12 of the other top eighth-graders in the region, including Kharique Irick, Joel Vargas, Keith Hamilton and Brandon Walters, in an exhibition that seemed as much for the coaches and their assistants as for the kids and their parents. The crowd of about 300 included coaches from the top PSAL and CHSAA high school programs from New York and New Jersey, one major sneaker company executive and several of the area's top AAU coaches.
"After that game, I talked to a bunch of coaches," says Rivers with a shrug. "They asked me if I wanted to come see a practice, maybe a game. I like that - it helps you decide what schools you are thinking about playing at."
Rivers, his mother and brother are weighing the merits of St. Raymond's, All Hallows, Loughlin and Rice. Pope and his family are considering Rice, St. Raymond's, Newark's, St. Patrick's and Blair Academy, a prep school in New Jersey.
"Just say that almost every Catholic school, prep school and a few public schools have called," says Pope Sr., who did not want to get any coach or program in trouble and would not name the coaches trying to recruit his son. "It's amazing. I never thought it would be like this. It's crazy. It was never this much when I went to school."
* * *
It's no secret that where these players go to high school is one of the most important decisions they will make for their basketball careers. The better programs get more publicity. They play in big-time tournaments all over the country and their players are seen by college coaches and even pro scouts.
Bottom line: Pope wants a chance to play in the pros someday. At one time, he was set on being an architect or a computer wizard. But that was until he was 4, and his godfather, Miguel Wallace, a coach for the budding Abyssinian Church AAU program, gave him his first taste of basketball.
"He immediately picked it up, he could dribble and we would show him something and he would pick it up right away," Wallace says. "We had to lie a little about his age, because there were no programs for kids that young. He was playing with the 7-year-olds when he was 5."
He learned to play at Abyssinian, and has grown into one of the best eighth graders in the city. And now the coaches at Abyssinian are his counselors.
On the 20-block cab ride from Mt. Carmel Junior High to the gym at the Frederick Samuels Center in Harlem where he works out with every age group of Abyssinian players Pope sees the kids that wasted their time. There are former players that have gotten caught up in drugs, there are players that just stopped going to class. Basketball alone, his mother and father constantly remind him, will not get him anywhere.
From his home on 155th St., Pope sees the walking examples of wasted basketball talent.
"He is always chaperoned, he is a 13-year-old boy and we will not allow him to get mixed up in the wrong things," Moore says. "We want this to be a positive thing for him. Anything that keeps kids focused and from hanging out on the streets is positive. We want to keep it that way."
Outside distractions are kept away from him. He has friends, mostly other players, like Anthony Jones, Joshua Watkins, Rashawn Salley and Kafele Carty, and left on their own at the gym, they either drift to the court or to a computer to check out basketball Web sites.
"The only other thing we do is play video games," Pope says. "NBA video games."
His father smiles. He has been worried about his son lately, he says. Pope told his dad that sometimes all this hype about basketball isn't so fun anymore.
"That's not how we want it to be for him," the father says, "I want him to have fun and to succeed. I think when we decide on a school it will be fun again."
Wallace shakes his head at the craziness in recruiting a 13-year-old.
"I know Snoop is going to be a good player, he has a chance to be a great player," Wallace says, looking at the kindergarten picture of Pope that he carries in his wallet. "But, he is young. He still makes young mistakes on the court sometimes. He's a kid. I hope they remember that he's just a kid."
The constant calls and conversation with recruiters have become tiresome for the entire family. The competition has heated up in the past few weeks and sometimes the family doesn't know who to believe. An article about Pope appeared the day after the Real Scout Invitational and it erroneously listed St. Benedict's as one of his high school choices. The St. Patrick's coach called as soon as he read the story.
"He wanted to know what was going on, why did I make a change," Pope says. "It was a little crazy."
The family has become wary of the distractions - Pope is also an honor-roll student at Mt. Carmel Junior High, and his mother proudly points out that she wants to keep him on that track. His father also knows the pitfalls. He played at Rice in the 1980s and knows how hard it is to balance the books and basketball in this city.
"Part of me just wants him to go to Rice. In my heart, I would like him to go there," Pope Sr. says. "But part of me also just wants him to go to prep school. I just want him to get out of all the hype and pressure that goes with playing high school basketball in the city. "I mean look at how crazy it is now," the father worries, "and he is just 13 years old."
Kids of all ages find success at Abyssinian
As Alexis Smith walks up Malcolm X Blvd. toward the Frederick Samuels Community Center, an older woman approaches him.
"Lex," the lady calls out. "Alexis, Charlie passed his SAT."
Smith holds open the door to the center, but stops to talk to the woman. Charlie Burgess, a former basketball player who left New York two years ago without a degree or a chance to continue playing basketball, was going to get both now. He congratulates Burgess' mother and his smile grows.
"Another success," Smith says as he walks into the nondescript Frederick Samuels Center on the corner of 144th St. and Malcolm X Blvd. where the church's youth basketball teams practice and play. "Another success for Abyssinian."
In this big, cavernous gym, Smith has built the youth basketball program known as Abyssinian Church on those kinds of success stories. A 10-year-old program that started out small as St. Mark's and grew into a seven-day-a-week program that has six levels of boys and girls teams, ages 8-and-under to 19-and-under.
"We take the kids that the other programs don't," Smith says, "the kids that have had problems or aren't the best players. We have kids go on and play college basketball and we have a kid that now has a good job with the housing department. Those are all our successes."
Abyssinian is not as well-known as other AAU powerhouses in the city, even though the program boasts some of the best-known alumni Allan Ray, JC Mathis, Louie McCroskey, Curt Stinson, Brian Laing and Peter Mulligan.
"We don't have the financial backing of other programs yet," Smith says, "but we are looking to get to that level. We want to be able to compete at every level."
Some of Abyssinians players are high school players that need some extra attention. Some are older players that are trying to come back from injury or bigger problems.
Kendel Provet, a former all-city player at Wadleigh High School, is back at Abyssinian.
After his sophomore year at Wadleigh, he drifted. He tried St. Benedict's, a prep school in New Jersey, but ended up on the streets, got caught up in a drug sting and spent a few month on Rikers Island.
"I know I should be looking at colleges right now," Provet says sadly. "I should be an all-star. I miss that."
His coaches at Abyssinian are trying to help keep him busy now that he is home. He's finishing his classwork at Bronx Regional, an alternative high school, and is working out at the center.
Two of the best eighth-graders in the city, Malcolm Pope Jr. and Justin Rivers, are in the 13-and-under group at Abyssinian and on this day they are running through drills in the Samuels Center gym. It's a loud a mix of boys from Harlem, the Bronx, Mount Vernon and Dobbs Ferry. Between drills they talk about their schools, their cell phones, allowances and homework.
Assistant director James Williams and coach Malcolm Pope Sr. are trying to keep the younger ones busy. "Keep 'em too busy to get out on the streets," Smith says with a smile. "Get 'em too tired to get into to any trouble, that's our plan. Another success for Abyssinian."
Originally published on January 19, 2003
Note: nydailynews.com
|
|
|
| |
|
|
