Jack McClinton's path to college basketball stardom at the University of Miami was not a direct route, but it was not nearly as bumpy as it might seem given the number of stops he made after leaving Baltimore nearly six years ago.
There was the year McClinton spent at South Kent School after graduating from Calvert Hall. Unlike many of his teammates at the prep school in rural Connecticut, McClinton was mostly there to work on his game, not his grades.
This often included one-on-one matchups in the middle of the night against teammate Dorell Wright, now with the Miami Heat.
"They would say lights out at 12. We'd wait about an hour for our dorm parents to go to sleep, we'd sneak out and run down to the gym," McClinton recalled this season. "We were kind of in the middle of nowhere. We were scared to go back in the dark. You'd never know what you'd see. You might see bears or something."
While Wright went directly to the NBA, there were not many Division I basketball offers for McClinton, who ended up at Siena College outside Albany, N.Y. One of the top freshmen in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, McClinton would have stayed had not his coach, Rob Lanier, been fired at the end of the season.
"I had a great, strong relationship with Coach Lanier, and when he left, I felt something of me left also," McClinton said.
McClinton's father, Jack, sent out highlight tapes to a number of schools, including Maryland.
"Every shot was a make; there were no misses," the younger McClinton said with a laugh. "When I saw that they [Miami] were going to offer me a scholarship, I saw that Robert Hite was a senior and Guillermo Diaz was probably going to leave early, so I knew the year I sat out I could get that much better and maybe come in and play right away."
Said Miami coach Frank Haith: "To be honest with you, he's exceeded my expectations. I thought Jack would be a nice player, but I didn't know that he'd be one of the best guards in the ACC."
In the year McClinton sat out at Miami in accordance with NCAA rules regarding transfers, Haith got a glimpse of what he has seen the past three seasons.
"He'd have his moments in practice where he'd dominate," Haith recalled.
McClinton has turned those moments in the privacy of practice into a regular occurrence in the Atlantic Coast Conference. During a three-game, 11-day stretch this season, McClinton scored 32 points against Wake Forest, 34 against Duke and a career-high 35 against North Carolina.
