7-footer Sharma might help Cardinal right away
Tom FitzGerald
While trying to size up Stanford's basketball prospects for next season in a recent story in The Chronicle, I mentioned that forwards Cameron Walker and Marcus Sheffield were prolific scorers in high school and might be able to contribute right away.
Unfortunately, I ignored another incoming freshman, one who will be an intriguing addition to the Cardinal mix - 7-footer Josh Sharma of Northfield Mount Hermon School in Gill, Mass.
Frankly, I wasn't impressed by his numbers - he averaged a modest 6.5 points and 4.1 rebounds this season. He was seventh on his team in scoring. He was ranked as a mere three-star prospect by the recruiting services.
I figured he might be another Stefan Nastic. That's not a bad thing; Nastic became an excellent college center by sheer hard work. But it took him a few years to get there. I basically wrote Sharma off as a contributor in 2015-16.
After talking with his coach, John Carroll, on the phone, my tune has changed. Maybe he'll be able to play right away as a backup to center Michael Humphrey.
Carroll explained that Sharma had to share the spotlight with 14 other Division I prospects on his loaded team. The team went to the national prep semifinals this year after winning the national title in 2013. Eleven different players led the team in scoring in various games. Moreover, a broken wrist delayed his first appearance as a senior.
"He's a top-of-the-line 7-footer,'' Carroll said. "He runs like a deer, jumps through the roof, blocks shots, shoots threes, and he took three AP classes. He's a unique player.''
Sharma transferred to the prep school after his sophomore year at Lexington (Mass.) High. His parents live in Hawaii since his dad, an aeronautical engineer, was transferred there.
"The reason I chose Northfield Mount Hermon is because it's one of the best basketball and academic schools in the country,'' he told the Lexington Minuteman.
He repeated his sophomore year and started attracting national attention partly because he can run the floor far better than most big men. He received a flood of offers but eventually picked Stanford over Wisconsin and Boston College.
"Playing in the NBA is obviously the final goal," he told the Minuteman. Stanford "just sent a couple of guys to the league last year so that's definitely another reason that I chose Stanford."
He was a baseball and soccer player growing up and didn't pick up basketball until eighth grade. He was 6-foot-3 then; by the end of ninth grade he was 6-8.
"You know when you're young and they tell you how tall you're going to be? They thought I was going to be 6-1, 6-3," Sharma told the Boston Globe. "Seven feet was not really … I didn't see it coming until I got here."
He played mainly facing the basket at NMH but he'll probably be a low-post player at Stanford. "Working with Tim O'Toole (a Stanford assistant who knows his way around New England as a player and head coach at Fairfield) is going to be great for him,'' Carroll said.
Tom FitzGerald is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: tfitzgerald@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @tomgfitzgerald
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Tom FitzGerald has been the Stanford beat writer for The San Francisco Chronicle since 2009. He also covers men's and women's basketball and many other Stanford sports.
He also covers motor sports in the Bay Area and wrote about the America's Cup regatta in San Francisco in 2013, during which Oracle Team USA made one of the greatest comebacks in sports history to beat Emirates Team New Zealand.
Among the many momentous games he has covered were the 49ers' victory over Dallas in the 1982 NFC Championship Game, which featured "The Catch'' by Dwight Clark, and the U.S. hockey team's 1980 Olympic upset of the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y. At the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, he rode the bobsled run with members of the U.S. team for a first-person story. He also rode on Russell Coutts' Oracle Team USA catamaran in 2012 and in an Indy car with legendary Mario Andretti in 2014 for other first-person stories.
For 15 years he wrote a popular sports humor column called "Top of the Sixth" (later re-titled "Open Season"). A weekly version of the column was nationally syndicated in as many as 50 daily newspapers.
He has a degree in political science from the University of Massachusetts. He lives in Benicia.