The No. 3 basketball recruit in the country visited Harvard this weekend
For all its prestige, it’s been a long time since Harvard has been considered much of an athletic powerhouse. So what comes next might be a surprise.
Wendell Carter Jr., the top uncommitted basketball recruit in the country, is considering taking his talents to Cambridge.
As multiple outlets reported last week, Carter was set to visit Harvard’s campus this weekend.
Due to NCAA rules, the college would not comment on the visit Monday. But according to his Twitter account, Carter seemed to enjoy it.
harvard was a movie this weekend #crimson ✊🏾😈
— Wendell Carter Jr (@wendellcarter34) September 18, 2016
Currently a senior at Pace Academy in Atlanta, the 17-year-old is the No. 3 high school prospect in the country, according to ESPN’s class of 2017 ranking. The No. 1 and No. 2 prospects, however, have already committed to schools, making Carter the top remaining prospect.
In an interview earlier this summer, Carter told ESPN that he already has a “great relationship” with Harvard basketball coach Tommy Amaker, who is looking to follow up his top-10 2016 recruiting class by landing the 6-foot-9 power forward.
For those not immediately familiar with the amateur basketball circuit, here’s a video of Carter mostly dunking on and swatting a bunch of teenagers during the 2016 U-17 FIBA World Championships this past July.
However, what makes Carter unique is not just his 7-foot-4 wingspan, or his dauntingly efficient AAU scoring statistics.
He also boasts 3.8 GPA, as SB Nation reported, and skipped the first weekend of the summer AAU season to act in a high school play back home in Atlanta.
“It speaks volumes to who he is as a person, as a student, as an athlete,” Pace Academy coach Demetrius Smith told ESPN of his well-rounded star. Carter’s AAU coach told SB Nation that those intangibles extended to the court.
“One thing that makes Wendell Carter so good is his basketball IQ,” coach Jon Adams said in a profile of Carter. “You don’t usually see a big fella that thinks about the game outside the block. He’s a really good team player, so him understanding basketball is a huge asset.”
Harvard, however, is not without competition for Carter. According to recruiting website 247 Sports, the highly rated prospect is slightly favored to pick Duke, where he visited last fall. Like Harvard, the Durham, North Carolina school offers strong academics—but also a tradition of basketball success.
“They’re a great academic school, but they’re a little bit better athletically,” Carter told ESPN in June. “That’s their pitch to me.”
A month earlier, he acknowledged that picking Harvard would be a step off the beaten path for a five-star recruit such as himself.
“That would really be a game changer,” Carter told a New York TV station. “That would be doing something that most athletes don’t normally do.”
https://twitter.com/wendellcarter34/status/755112875732140032
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