Coming out of high school, Dayshawn Wright thought it would take him two years to make it to the NBA.

The basketball standout had all the reason to think he was destined for the pros: He was the 51st-ranked recruit by Rivals.com, heading back to his hometown to play at Syracuse, a team one year removed from a national title. And he was coming off his own high school championship at Oak Hill (Va.) Academy.

Josh Smith, his teammate at Oak Hill, had been selected 17th in the 2004 NBA draft two months earlier, a year after Carmelo Anthony finished his first year at Syracuse and was drafted third. Wright thought he could hone his skills with the Orange for a couple of years before following suit.

Three years and four teams later, the situation is different. But the goal remains the same.

Wright sits in the Liverpool High School gym, 13 miles and a world away from the Carrier Dome – where he should be starting his senior season for the Syracuse men’s basketball team. His new team, the Syracuse Raging Bullz of the American Basketball Association, is warming up for its first exhibition game of the season. Sitting beside the court, Wright’s eyes light up when he hears the three letters that have eluded him for so long.

‘That’s one of my dreams, I’m never going to give up on that,’ Wright said of playing in the NBA. ‘Especially while I’m still young.’

The dream started in Wright’s neighborhood in Syracuse, where basketball was the way off the streets and on to a better life. He had seen the violence, the drug and alcohol abuse, and everything else that could keep a promising young basketball player off the court. He had watched his father fall victim to the world of drugs and disappear from his life while he was still in high school.

‘There were bad influences everywhere,’ Wright’s mother, Patricia, said. ‘It’s like the people, places and things. I figure it’s who you are around. And he has some friends who will try to take him the other way, make him do bad or whatever, because they think that that’s cool. But he stays out of that, he tries to.’

As her son grew older and into a star forward at Fowler High School, Patricia started seeing what the sport could do for her son. As time progressed, she realized that his way out was on the hardwood.

‘At the time, I didn’t think like that,’ she said. ‘I thought like that when he started going to Fowler, and then when he started going to Oak Hill Academy.’

Oak Hill Academy, the ‘basketball factory’ in Mouth of Wilson, Va., had its alumni all over NBA rosters. Anthony, Jerry Stackhouse, Stephen Jackson and Marcus Williams had all walked the halls where Wright would soon find himself. If he was going to make it to the NBA, this was where it would start. He came out with a national championship, a strong scouting report and a multitude of scholarship offers to play basketball at a major college program.

So when it came down to choosing a school, Patricia Wright thought her son should stay far away from his old neighborhood. With schools like Arizona, Connecticut and Seton Hall all vying for his services, Patricia saw plenty of opportunities for her son to get a fresh start.

His phone rang, and suddenly all his plans changed.

In October 2003, Wright had decided to play at Arizona. It was the middle of his season at Oak Hill, and after weighing his options, Wright had chosen a school in a desert 2,000 miles away from Syracuse. He was planning to give his verbal commitment the next day.

But when it rang, Wright picked up his cell phone to hear the voice of SU assistant coach Mike Hopkins.

‘Hopkins called me up on the phone and was like, ‘We heard everything that was going on,’ and just told me to give him my verbal right there, and that’s when I did it,’ Wright said. ‘The next day it was in the paper.’

It didn’t take much more convincing than that.

The decision made Patricia Wright nervous. She had been unimpressed with Syracuse’s effort during the recruiting process, and she thought that his hometown school might not be as interested in her son as she had hoped. Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim said his program recruited Wright as it would have any other athlete, and remembers his mother coming up to the school to meet with him.

‘I talked to his mother just like I talked to anybody’s mother,’ said Boeheim. ‘I liked Dayshawn, I liked him as a player, I always did.’

But there were other problems. Patricia knew her son was coming back to his old neighborhood – one that now included his newborn daughter, Serenity, along with all the distractions he left behind when he went to Virginia. Even with his mother’s help raising the baby, she was afraid it would be hard for Dayshawn to focus on the schoolwork, and everything else would get in the way academically.

‘I gave, I can say about 80 percent,’ Dayshawn Wright said of his academic work. ‘The other 20 percent, I was just, there was a lot of stress. I had a little baby coming up.’

Wright struggled academically, especially after basketball practice started. A daily regiment of two hours of study hall and a visit from Stan Kissell, director of basketball operations, wasn’t enough to keep him on track. His playing time dwindled as the season went on, but Boeheim insisted that those two events were unrelated.

‘If you’re academically eligible, then it would not affect your playing time at all,’ Boeheim said. ‘If you were not doing well in school, that could affect your playing time if you were doing very, very poorly. But that’s not necessarily the case with Dayshawn.’

On the court his freshman year, he appeared in 10 games, averaging 1.3 points and 1.3 rebounds. But as the season went on, it became apparent that Wright had some off-the-court issues, culminating when he and two of his teammates – Josh Wright and Billy Edelin – did not make the team’s trip to the NCAA Tournament, for reasons still undisclosed.

After the 2004-05 season ended, Wright was informed that he did not earn the minimum 1.8 GPA required by the NCAA and would have to redshirt his sophomore year. He stayed at the university during the summer, taking classes to try to bring up his GPA. Along the way, Boeheim was there to offer support.

‘He was supporting, just telling me there’s a lot of people who want to see me fall, and to not stay focused,’ Wright said. ‘He was trying to help me through the situation.’

But in the end, it wasn’t enough. After his fall semester grades came in, Wright was informed that he could not stay on as a student at Syracuse.

‘Obviously, it just didn’t work out,’ Wright said. ‘I guess that’s life. You move on with it.’

In a North Dakota jail, Wright picked up the phone and dialed Chris Daleo, hoping for a second chance.

He was with his third team since leaving Syracuse – the Minot Skyrockets of the Continental Basketball Association – and was counting on his new coach to bail him out of his latest trouble: Wright had been pulled over by the Minot police for making an illegal left turn. When the officer found marijuana and an open container in the car, he arrested Wright and his passenger.

But what Wright heard on the other end was anything but a second chance.

‘He was just like, ‘I don’t know what to do for you, Dayshawn. You got yourself into that situation, I can’t do anything,’ knowing that he could have if he wanted, though,’ Wright said.

Daleo cut Wright immediately afterward, and Wright moved back to Syracuse after paying a fine for the charges. It was the end of a long road that led him away from his hometown, and then back to it.

After leaving Syracuse, he had enrolled at Mountain State, an NAIA school in West Virginia, but he dropped out months later when he realized his coach was not giving him the personal attention on the court he felt he needed. Wright also needed money to support his girlfriend and daughter back in Syracuse.

For money, he needed to go pro. He declared himself eligible, ending his collegiate career at age 20. After a brief stint with the Buffalo Silverbacks of the ABA- which he soon left because of financial reasons – Wright was drafted first overall in the CBA draft.

If he was looking to get away from his hometown, he couldn’t have had a better opportunity than with Minot, located in a northern North Dakota town, population 36,000, 55 miles from Canada.

But two months later, he was back in Central New York, right where he started.

His phone rang, and suddenly Wright had the opportunity he had been looking for.

It was his brother, telling him about the Raging Bullz, a new ABA team coming to Syracuse. Wright had been scouring the Internet for a team to play for, but he worried about how his arrest would affect his chances. He called up the general manager, who told him about tryouts.

Wright made the team, and was greeted with a coach, Terrill Dean, who is committed to keeping his players on the right track.

‘Each day in practice we talk to them about making the right decisions and doing the right things,’ Dean said. ‘And each opportunity that we get, we provide them the opportunity to come and talk to us about personal problems, talk about family problems, talk about anything.’

Dean said he thinks Wright is still young enough and talented enough to make it in the NBA. That’s still a long shot considering at age 22, Wright has already been from the top of the basketball world to the bottom.

But he has another chance. That’s all Dayshawn Wright is asking for.

‘Yeah, it’s positive this time,’ Wright said. ‘This time I’m definitely going to do the right thing, staying away from the streets, trying to work, take care of my daughters and do what I need to do.’

Published on October 29, 2007 at 12:00 pm