It was a night Douglas senior James McLaughlin said he'll remember for the rest of his life.
He'd just returned from the Double Pump West Coast All-Star Camp in California and was working his normal shift at Round Table Pizza.
Then the call came.
"It was my mom and she said that I wasn't going to believe who just called our house," McLaughlin said. "I didn't think it was going to be anything about basketball.
"She said it was a coach from the University of Montana (Andy Hill).
"I just had to walk outside, I had no idea. It was a huge shock to me."
He'd been named among the top 20 juniors at the camp, but this was the first contact he'd received from a Division I school (coaches are allowed one phone call before July 1 of a student's senior year).
That brought about the next question though. What next?
The McLaughlins decided the best approach would be to let colleges know James was serious about playing at the next level.
"We enrolled him in the NCAA Clearinghouse," James' dad, Joe McLaughlin said. "It certifies your GPA, your test scores and all of that and it pretty much becomes public knowledge to college coaches.
"It's pretty simple, if you aren't cleared by the NCAA, they don't know who you are.
They won't know what they're getting."
The process, McLaughlin said, is simple enough " Just an online form and a subsequent printout that has to be submitted to the high school administration which in turn is sent to the NCAA.
"At camps, they have you write down your GPA and stuff," James McLaughlin said.
"But the clearinghouse verifies what you're saying. It also gives you an idea if you have the right classes in place so you don't get caught off-guard with anything in your transcripts before it's too late."
McLaughlin has also been asking advice from his friends who've most recently gone through the process (Keith Olson " now at Northern Arizona " and Jeff Nady, who will play football for Nevada next year).
"One of things that has stuck with me the most is that Keith said to make sure to always show interest in the schools that contact you," McLaughlin said. "It shows them that you're worth their time. They just don't know if you're not communicating with them. They don't know where you stand, and that gets around to other schools that might be interested.
"Other than that, it's just a matter of working hard everywhere you go, because you just don't know who is watching you."
Other than that, the next several months will be a waiting game.
With McLaughlin surely to generate some interest based on his athletic ability alone, Douglas High coach Corey Thacker has been asking around about what to expect.
"A lot of it is going to depend on how his July goes," Thacker, who coached at Spring Creek prior to coming to Douglas last season, said. "If he does a good job at his camps and impresses some people, they'll start coming on pretty heavy with the phone calls.
"If the interest is really heavy, then I'll start getting some calls. I've been asking around with other coaches about how to handle it. I've had guys going to a junior college before but I haven't had this type of talent. It'll be exciting."
