“You don’t belong here.” Harrison Barnes, an impossible 14-year-old, had drop-stepped his way into a basket-jolting dunk on the first day of freshman practice. That night, his mother was informed of the damage he had done. Changes were made, permissions granted, and on Day Two, Barnes was informed in no uncertain terms that a team of underclassmen was no place for him. “You don’t belong here,” Ames High basketball coach Vance Downs told him. That messaged proved to be extraordinarily true.
One of the nation’s top prospects, after all, doesn’t belong in the eighth-largest town in Iowa.