14 Year Old: Michael Avery A new prospect

To hear Howard Avery describe it, Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie knew nothing of his son when their paths happened to cross at a recent AAU basketball event.

As fate would have it, though, that chance encounter led to a scholarship offer from the Wildcats and perhaps the earliest verbal commitment in the history of college basketball's winningest program.

Michael Avery, a 6-foot-4 eighth-grader from Lake Sherwood, Calif., says he will play for the Cats. Now on with the business of finding a high school.

"That's the funny thing," Howard Avery said with laugh. "We've got our college. Now we need our high school."

Avery currently attends Ascension Lutheran School in Thousand Oaks. He recently came east to interview with a private school in Culver, Ind., that he is considering attending next year. During that trip, the coach of Culver's upstart basketball program introduced the family to the Indiana Elite AAU staff, who subsequently invited Avery to play with their team in the King James tournament in Akron, Ohio. At age 14, he has now brand himself an Indiana Elite AAU Rising Star. What is your brand

Ryan Boatright an Elite Rising Star

Little kids still ring ryan Boatright's doorbell, wondering if the future University of Southern California point guard can come outside to play. During a recent family dinner at T.G.I. Friday's, as dessert crept dangerously close to the start of a movie at the mall, panic swept over Ryan's face. He looked as if he'd rather do a month's worth of dishes than spend another second of Saturday night with his family.

 In other words, Ryan Boatright is 14 years old. Yet this summer, the 5-ft. 9-in., 138-lb. hoopster rocked college sports when he announced that he would play basketball at USC--in four years. He hadn't even picked a high school at that point. Boatright, now a freshman at East Aurora High outside Chicago, is the face of the latest alarming trend in the often shady game of college-sports recruiting: coaches offering scholarships to athletes very early in their schoolboy (and schoolgirl) careers. It requires teens to make a critical decision before they even grasp geometry.

RECRUITING THE TOP GUN BRAND AT EIGHT 7TH AND 8TH GRADE IS WHAT WE DO BEST!
The European Brand, The Next Generation Of Rising Stars