DELL COMMENTARY: Tre Clark moving into some special company

If we put Tre Clark's commitment to Furman this week in perspective it's quite an achievement.

It has been 37 years since a Palmetto High School boys basketball player has gone directly from high school to a Division I college program on a full scholarship.

The last one to do it is Donnie Mays, who signed with Penn State in 1979. Wilmore Fowler, who finished his career for Palmetto in 1977 and is still the program's career scoring leader with 2,274 points, played at Kansas out of high school and finished his career at Georgia where he played with NBA Hall of Famer Dominique Wilkins.

The last public high school boys basketball player from the county to go directly to a Division I program on scholarship is LeCory Ruffin, who in 2007 signed with Birmingham-Southern University. Unfortunately for him, the school dropped to Division III the next season and Ruffin eventually wound up playing for Manatee Community College (now SCF).

The last public school

boys basketball player to go to a Division I basketball program on full scholarship and finish his career at that same school is Howard Porter Jr., a 1991 Manatee High graduate who played at the University of Central Florida.

It is extremely tough to play at the highest level of college basketball and difficult for a high school player at 17 or 18 to determine which college program is the best fit.

Every year there are more than 700 transfers in Division I college basketball and many coaches say they prefer them over kids right out of high school.

There have been five players from Southeast who went directly from high school to a Division I college basketball program on scholarship.

The list includes three standouts who were named Florida's Mr. Basketball (Clifford Rozier, LeRon Williams and Adrian McPherson). None of them finished at the school they signed with, and McPherson went to FSU for football.

Rozier, Manatee County's only NBA first-round draft pick, signed with Dean Smith at North Carolina and transferred to Louisville, where he earned first team All-American honors under Denny Crum, another legendary college basketball coach.

He felt restricted under Smith, but Crum gave him the freedom to showcase his talents and helped him reach his potential.

Williams went directly to Florida and played under Lon Kruger. He left the program after Billy Donovan was hired and played his last two seasons at South Carolina,

Desmond Copeland from Southeast, signed with Jacksonville University in 2002 out of high school, but never finished his career there.

Bradenton Christian is the trendsetter in its own right. Since 2000, the Panthers have three players who received full scholarships to Division I basketball programs out of high school in D.J. Magley, Ryan Bradley and Jameson Tipping.

Magley, BCS career scoring and rebound leader, started at Western Kentucky and finished at Tulsa and is the only one of the trio who played four years of Division I basketball. Tipping is playing for the Brampton A's in the National Basketball League of Canada.

Any discussion of local basketball greats would not be complete without mentioning Waite Bellamy, who averaged 30 points per game for Lincoln during segregation days.

The 6-foot-3 guard averaged 27.9 points per game at Florida A&M, where he was a small school All-American and was the 33d pick in the 1963 NBA draft.

He won three scoring titles in the Eastern League, which at the time was considered the second best professional basketball league in the county and is an inductee in the National Negro High School Basketball Hall of Fame.

Alan Dell, Herald sports columnist/writer, can be reached at 941-745-7056. Follow him on Twitter @ADellSports

This story was originally published March 17, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "DELL COMMENTARY: Tre Clark moving into some special company ."