Howard Making Push For NBA Top Spot

He kneels down by a chair during warm ups, praying to God for strength, for protection, for guidance, for safety, for fun and for inspiration. He never prays for a win. Quietly, he gets back into the lay up line, ignoring the requests from 13 year olds to ‘dunk it like the And1 guys’. He breaks a sweat, he wishes his opponents well, he shakes hands with the referees, he smiles with his teammates. And then the ball is thrown into the air and Dwight Howard becomes the most dominant high school basketball player in the world.

The 6-foot-11 forward with guard skills and a power interior game plays at Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy (SACA), a small school with an enrollment of 350. A school that is so small and so relatively unknown that it isn’t listed in the phone book. Gas station attendants can’t give directions to lost basketball goers, searching for the small academy.

But the school that features Howard and his Warrior teammates is becoming a household name in the South. Soon it will be household name in the United States. The 17-year-old that prays before every game on the sideline is quietly becoming a superstar.

SACA head coach Courtney Brooks, who just won his 100th career game last week in a stomping of Greenforest Christian 107-48, spent the summer looking for advice on how to handle the rigors of the attention he was bound to get with Howard on board for his final year.

Brooks picked up the phone and called a man that has been through the process before. He called St. Vincent St. Mary (OH) head coach Dru Joyce, the former coach of LeBron James, last year’s number one pick in the NBA Draft.

“I just said, ‘I’m new to this. How do we handle this? What things should I look out for? What should I expect? How did he deal with the NBA scouts?” Brooks asked.

Joyce relished in the chance to be on the other side of the advice. “I basically told him that the first and foremost thing is his program. He can’t get caught up in coaching just one guy because it’s easy to do that and forget everyone else,” Joyce said.

“‘Focus on the things you can control.’ That gets the message across to the kids. With the cameras and reporters and everything else, it’s easy to understand why they take their eyes off of what’s important.” Joyce said.

So far SACA is focusing on what is important. The 12 players on the roster have helped the Warriors achieve their 14-1 record. Every game, Howard has a television camera(s) and a reporter(s) capturing his every move – including RivalsHoops. That kind of attention was another area of concern for Brooks and Joyce.

“The main thing was all of the media requests,” Joyce said of last season’s ride with James. “We probably didn’t make a bunch of friends because we were adamant about our policies. We wanted the kids to enjoy being a senior in high school and just have a regular year like every other 18 year old.”

That is the mission of SACA, says Dwight Howard, Sr. – the father of Dwight and athletic director for the Warriors.

“We just try to keep him grounded. We want him to enjoy it and so far, he has,” the senior Howard said. “I don’t know if I’d call (the attention) a circus but it’s been a lot of people wanting little pieces of your time. That starts to add up in the end. Dwight just wants to play basketball like every other kid that laces ‘em up.”

Joyce finally gave Brooks one more piece of advice.

“I never had NBA scouts in practice. I would not do that,” Joyce said. “My feeling was if they want to come to a game and see him, then come on. We were at enough places that they didn’t even have to travel that far to see (LeBron.)…If I would have opened the door for one, than they would have come out in droves.”

And scouts aren’t traveling too far to see Howard, either.

They come to see Howard like a parade is rolling through town. A dozen or so scouts saw the forward with Chris Weber-like passing skills in Los Angeles last week. 17 watched the forward with an Amare Stoudamire-like power game in Delaware during the Slam Dunk to the Beach; the country’s most prestigious tourney. (SACA won the event.) 14 (including Marty Blake, the NBA’s director of scouting) watched Howard at the start of the season at an Atlanta tournament.

20 more are projected to come to Atlanta on Saturday as Howard faces off with his AAU partner Randolph Morris at the tiny Atlanta Metro Junior College. More scouts will come to Greenville, South Carolina when SACA plays in the Battle of the Border Classic on Jan. 19. Even more scouts and perhaps even suits from the League office will see them in New Jersey at the Prime Time Shootout on Feb. 7.

The scouts know what they like in Howard. They like him enough to make the high schooler a lottery pick, and perhaps the first overall selection in the 2004 NBA draft.

“From what I’ve seen, I have little doubt that he’ll be a top five pick,” says one Western Conference scout. “He’s just a grounded kid. You won’t have to worry about him speeding in a foreign car or getting drunk with some bums from back home. He’ll probably go home and write in his journal and call his mother. And I don’t say that as an insult at all.”

Howard and James will be compared because of their talent level and domination on the court but one scout thinks otherwise.

“Dwight and LeBron are two totally different machines,” an Eastern Conference scout said. “It’s hard to compare the both of them because they are so different in every way possible. But I’ll say this about Dwight: he’s nasty. Everyone talks about how nice he is as a person but the kid is just sick on the court. He just muscles over people down low. If you foul him hard, he’ll just dunk it on the next possession and won’t say a word. But I’ll guarantee you that he won’t be fouled hard again.”

Howard doesn’t seem phased by the hundreds of questions each month about his decision on going pro. It is something he’s been hearing since Kevin Garnett jumped from preps to the pros.

“I was ten years old when I was first asked about the NBA, so those types of questions don’t bother me at all,” Howard said. “Right now, I’m just worried about winning basketball games. I’ll cross that bridge when it comes along.”

That bridge is slowly being built as Howard continues to dominate the prep scene. He is clearly the top player in Atlanta, in Georgia, in the South, in the country and in the world. But when it boils down to it, he is still that humble and gentle giant kneeling on the chair before the game.

“I don’t play to anyone but the Lord and my team. Nobody in the stands matter. It’s just me, the goal, my team and whoever we are playing,” Howard said. “My team is what matters the most, not who is watching because I don’t even pay attention to any of it.”

Little does Howard know, that everyone is watching him.

Stay tuned to RivalsHoops as we watch him on Saturday against Randolph Morris, on Jan. 17th against the team that knocked SACA out of the playoffs (Whitfield) and at the Battle of the Border on Martin Luther King Day.