Sports

Wednesday, Jun. 03, 2009

College Basketball: Cal Poly Mustangs get verbal commitment from former N.Y. prep star

Amaurys Fermin, who led his New York High School to a city title in 2005, would enter Cal Poly as a junior

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Amaurys Fermin once scored 47 points in a game during a standout high school career at John F. Kennedy High in Bronx, N.Y. The big-bodied point guard — most often compared to Deron Williams of the Utah Jazz — was an all-everything, city and state.

He scored a game-high 19 points while leading his team to a public school city championship in front of Spike Lee in Madison Square Garden in 2005. And the Dominican Republic native had a deal to play for Providence when his prep career ended.

An inadequate SAT score, instability at two different prep schools and a coaching change at his first junior college have partly led him to where he is today: Packing for his official visit to Cal Poly, where he’s set to become the fourth player in the first recruiting class of new head coach Joe Callero.

“My high school career was good,” Fermin said, “then it went downhill.

“That’s why I’ve just matured more, and I learned how to basically survive in the basketball business.”

Fermin, who’s finishing up his sophomore year at Maryland’s Hagerstown City College, said he has committed to playing for the Mustangs next season, hoping it ends a streak of five years at five different schools.

Callero, hired to replace fired coach Kevin Bromley in early April, netted three recruits during the signing period and said he only has one more official visit allotted by the NCAA.

Not allowed to comment on recruits until they sign a national letter of intent — and Fermin won’t, since the signing period ended May 20 — all Callero could do was confirm that Fermin was going to be on campus this weekend.

Fermin and his current coach, Earl Redden, said they conducted a press conference Wednesday in Hagerstown, Md., announcing to the local media that its one-and-done hero is heading to San Luis Obispo.

Based on his on-court résumé, he’d be an early candidate to step right into the Mustangs starting lineup.

A 6-foot-2, 210-pound floor general who can pass and score, Fermin was called on by coaches from Maryland, DePaul, Western Kentucky, TCU, Central Florida, Gardner Webb and Marshall among others, Redden said.

Impressed by Fermin’s stat line — 17.5 points, 8.2 assists and 4.0 rebounds per game in one season at Hagerstown — the schools backed off after finding out Fermin had to pass 38 credits during the school year and still needs nine more during summer school to earn his Associate of Arts degree, the key to NCAA Division I eligibility.

“He’s a kid that really took a heavy load of academics at our school this year,” Redden said, “and really excelled in the classroom. He still needed a couple classes here during the summer. A couple of them were kind of worried about that. At big schools, if you’re not graduating in May, they’re kind of skeptical.”

They’d have more reason than that to be skeptical of Fermin.

He had to play so much catch-up this year because of his stint at Missouri State University-West Plains, a two-year school Fermin went to as a fallback after the NCAA ruled him ineligible and dashed a commitment to Cincinnati.

Because of his late enrollment in Missouri, Fermin said he didn’t get enough of the classes he needed to transfer.

It wasn’t the first occasion he’d wasted time on his windy road through college basketball.

After he was ruled ineligible to go to Providence out of high school, Fermin spent a year at Laurinberg Institute in North Carolina before finding out his classes there wouldn’t count toward NCAA eligibility.

So he chose to spend a year at another prep school, Patterson Prep in North Carolina in 2006-07.

As long as Fermin passes a college-level algebra class this summer, all that moving around would only mean he’ll finally get to Division I, just a little older and wiser.

Now four years removed from his city title in the Garden, Fermin will be 22 years old for the start of next season.

To a school with a strenuous academic reputation, Fermin is a risky recruit. Senior guard Trae Clark’s dismissal from the team under Bromley couldn’t have helped the former coach in his pursuit to keep a job.

But at best, Fermin could be a turnaround success story, a previous academic casualty who got his act together just in time. Those who know him think he can do it.

“Really his desire to win, and his knack of knowing how to handle himself off the court are his biggest assets,” Redden said. “He handles himself like a very good young man that has his values and his priorities in place.”