Harlem’s Mohamed Bamba is a top-5 prospect in the Class of 2017. We’ll be following Bamba on the journey through his senior year of high school as he holds down the SLAM HS Diarist position for the 2015-16 season.
School has been great so far. This year more than any other year, I was eager to get back.
My favorite class right now is Designing & Engineering. When I was younger, I used to always think about engineering, but it kind of faded as my plate became increasingly full with basketball and all the other life obligations that go along with being a high schooler. But this class has triggered some memories and the learning experience has really been fun. My two group members, Brandon Randolph and Cole Berger, and me, we’re working to invent a prototype that improves a player’s jumpshot. We put a circular sensor around the rim and that tracks misses and have it use the data we collected to hit more shots.
I can’t go too much deeper into that right now – we might be patenting something here!
We’re still in the process of figuring out the program and the coding, but I think it’s something that will be awesome.
I’ve also been updating a binder I put together over the summer with files on each school in my recruitment. Some might see me as being nerdy about it but this is the best way to go about it. In theory, this is one of the biggest decisions I’m going to ever make. If you saw how big this binder was, you’d be like, ‘Who are you?!’ I’ve named it THE BLUEPRINT.
The categories in the excel spreadsheets under each school measure success in various majors, total university endowment, how many Fortune 500 CEOs each school has, total enrollment, living alumni worldwide, percentage of alumni in management positions – things that will be important to me for my business career that will hopefully extend far beyond the 94×50’ dimensions of the basketball court.
On the basketball side, some of the categories I’ve looked at are how many first round picks each school has had over the past five years, how many were one-and-done, the number of NBA owners and managers that are alums, etc. A big part of the binder has information about compliance and I’ve added articles and case studies to it along the way. Every week there’s been something to add.
