June 27, 2000

He's half-man, half-amazing now, but back at Mainland High (Daytona Beach, Fla.) in 1995, Vince Carter was just a promising player with raw talent and NBA dreams.

	Vince Carter's road to the NBA ran through Chapel Hill, N.C. first.

Toronto Raptors All-Star forward Vince Carter had the talent to think about playing in the NBA as a teenager. However, five years ago, at the height of Carter's scholastic senior season, the path from high school to the NBA hadn't been traveled for more than a decade - Kevin Garnett was readying to play Christopher Columbus to Darryl Dawkins' Leif Eriksson.

"There was never even a question back then (about Carter trying for the pros)," says Mainland boys' basketball coach Charlie Brinkerhoff, who notes he was never approached by anyone from the NBA about Carter that year.

If Carter were a high school senior now, however, there's no doubt things would be different.

"I'm sure the attention would be there," says Brinkerhoff, who saw Carter go on to become a star at the University of North Carolina before being drafted in 1998. "And with his family background, he'd have been more like (Los Angeles Lakers guard) Kobe Bryant because he has two strong parental figures [in] his family background."

Adds Brinkerhoff, "I don't think Vince was any less prepared than the [players] who have gone straight from high school recently."

It was only a few years ago that the concept of jumping straight from high school to the pros began to gain widespread momentum. Berkmar High (Lilburn, Ga.) head coach David Boyd experienced that evolution first-hand, having coached current Georgia Tech guard Tony Akins, the 1998 Georgia Prep Player of the Year.

"I think [going to the NBA] probably went through his mind," says Boyd. "It wasn't something that he and I talked about much. He probably thought a year or two of college experience under his belt would be good."

Nowadays, things have changed, and the temptation to skip university life for big bucks is prominent in the mind of every high school star. Boyd and Brinkerhoff are in agreement that you have to take every athlete on a case-by-case basis.

In Boyd's case, he would advise his player based on what guarantees the player has been offered by the pros. He says he would have done that with Akins and will do the same this year with 6-foot-6 senior Clark Williams.

"If they guarantee that he'll be a No. 1 (first-round) pick, then I'd say go for it," says Boyd. "Otherwise, I'd definitely advise him to go to school."

For Brinkerhoff, it's more a question of what options a player has. A talent like Carter's Toronto Raptors teammate Tracy McGrady had poor grades, making pro hoops his best option, even if he wasn't fully prepared for the jump. Carter's grades, however, gave him more of a choice. And in Brinkerhoff's mind, that was a good thing.

"I don't think he was ready, and I would have been honest and said he wasn't ready," says Brinkerhoff. "A lot of the guys that have done it, a lot of them weren't ready, like Tracy McGrady.

"With Vince, that wasn't ever an option because he had the grades to go to [North] Carolina."