“She told us this morning,” Mario Davenport said. “We shot videos with the final schools, so when she told us which one she wanted we had everything ready to go. It was just the last part we had to put on there, so we put it on there and we put it out today.”
Maori said a tremendous recruiting visit earlier this month to the Piscataway Township, N.J., campus, and her and her parents’ impression of Stringer and her staff made Rutgers stand out.
“At first, I didn’t know nothing about them,” the player said. “But I did research and that lady has done a lot for a lot of people.”
Her parents were equally impressed.
“To be honest, we were not expecting what we saw,” Tara said.
“When it came down to our recruiting process, just me personally, when you’ve got a coaching staff that pays attention to the parents and they listen to what the parents are really saying, that’s important,” Mario said. “Looking at Rutgers, we really appreciated that. So when she decided that that’s where she wanted to go, we were really happy.”
“The education is second to none,” Tara said. “We got with each professor. There was a lot of hands-on things that Maori was excited about. Then the coaching staff, all of them played WNBA, played under coach Stringer, very professional – all the coaches at all times. It was just impressive.”
The only thing, of course, is that Rutgers is more than 1,000 miles from Troy.
“Everything else was perfect,” Tara said. “The visit was perfect. We didn’t know where she was going to go. We approved all four schools and we just didn’t know which one she would choose.”
Timing is everything. Rutgers is where Zipporah “Zippy” Broughton, Alabama’s Miss Basketball this season who went to Robert E. Lee High in Montgomery, is preparing for her freshman season. In addition, Hoover High guard Joiya Maddox, an AAU teammate of Davenport’s for the past four or five seasons, verbally committed to Rutgers in July
Jones also noted Rutgers was one of the first “national” programs to contact Davenport.
“They’ve been down here from Day 1, freshman season,” the coach said. “Some schools come and go, but they stuck around. I’m not talking about just Charles Henderson. They’ve gone to high school tournaments we played in when they could, and AAU in the offseason. They’ve been here watching her the whole time.”
