On a typical weekday, the alarm in Mike Beasley and Nolan Smith's room squawks at 6 a.m. Smith, a sophomore at Riverdale Baptist School, gets out of bed and prepares for class, just like any other bleary-eyed teenager whose slumber is interrupted before sunrise.
The alarm also wakes Beasley, Smith's close friend and Riverdale Baptist varsity basketball teammate, but he is in no rush. Beasley's school day has no homeroom, no bells to start or end a class, and is generally over in 2 1/2 to three hours. Some days, it includes a trip to a local community center, where Beasley works out with a personal trainer -- and receives academic credit for it.
Mike Beasley averages 16.9 points and 11.5 rebounds for Riverdale Baptist (17-2), one of the area's best teams.
(Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
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His classes are held at his weekday home in Upper Marlboro, which also happens to be the home of Beasley's summer league basketball coach, Curtis Malone. Beasley, 16, who could become the first player from the Washington area to go straight from high school to the NBA, is home-schooled and pays a fee to play for Riverdale.
The arrangement has created a stir in area basketball circles. Just 14 state high school athletic governing bodies allow home-schooled athletes to play for their teams, and Maryland, Virginia and the District are not among them. Maryland's and Virginia's state associations, which do not include private schools such as Riverdale, go a step further, banning their teams from playing squads that use home-schoolers.
"That's like having a ringer," Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association Executive Director Ned Sparks said. "Our regulations say our schools can play against school teams. That's obviously a school-plus, a school team plus some extras."
Area coaches privately wonder whether being home-schooled while living with Malone, who runs the area's most successful offseason basketball program, D.C. Assault, is simply a way to help Beasley maximize the time he can spend training and working on his basketball. And the NCAA has in recent years targeted relationships between recruits and summer league coaches as potential amateurism violations.
Those close to Beasley, however, say the arrangement is working splendidly for a teenager they say needs individual attention to help his education and maturation process.
"The only way that you would look at it skeptically is if you were looking at it in a negative way," said Beasley's mother, Fatima Smith, who lives in Gaithersburg with her four other children and indicates that the scenario is no different than when she sent her oldest son to live with an aunt so he could attend school in Anne Arundel County for one year. "Michael lives with Curtis primarily for school reasons. Christmas break, Thanksgiving break, he's home. It just works better for us. If you don't know us, you don't know. Me and Michael talk three times a day. I talk to Curtis every day. It's like an extended family."
On the court, Beasley produces few skeptics. He's 6 feet 9, agile and strong, averaging 16.9 points and 11.5 rebounds. He has helped make the Crusaders (17-2) one of the area's best teams this season. Coaches of other teams agree he could make just about any public school team a state championship contender.
"I think he's really one of the best young players that I've observed," said Bob Gibbons, a recruiting analyst who selects players for the NBA Players Association's Top 100, a camp for elite high school players. "He just has such an advanced game for a young kid and, the old cliche, plays without fear. He was not intimidated by bigger, older players. He just has limitless potential."
Malone said Beasley -- who has been told by doctors that he will grow at least three more inches -- compares favorably with his best former players, including Rodney White and DerMarr Johnson, who each spent one year in college before being selected in the first round of the NBA draft.
"It can be scary how good he can be," Malone said. "The important thing is keeping his head on right."
That's why Beasley is home-schooled, his mother says. He enrolled in kindergarten a year early because day care was too expensive, she said. She said she had her son repeat the eighth grade twice because she was unhappy with his educational and emotional development.
The first of those two school years, 2002-03, was spent attending National Christian Academy in Fort Washington and Laurinburg (N.C.) Institute, two schools known for their basketball programs. Last year, Beasley was an eighth-grader at a private boarding school on the IMG Academies' plush campus in Bradenton, Fla. He was talented enough to merit a full scholarship worth in excess of $30,000 at a facility best known for training would-be pro athletes, including D.C. United's Freddy Adu.
