On a fall day in 2017, Jordan Derkack walked into the gym at Colonia High School and saw a tall, wiry stranger hooping it up.
“I was like, who the hell is this guy?” Derkack recalled.
It was the new kid in town, Chad Baker-Mazara. Son of a basketball coach who’d played pro ball, Baker-Mazara immigrated from the Dominican Republic to live with a relative in Woodbridge at the start of his junior year of high school. Derkack went out for pizza with him after the workout, and a few months later, they were playing junior varsity ball together.
“We were killing teams,” Derkack said. “I remember drawing up lob plays and thinking, ‘Why is he still playing JV?’ We won a JV Christmas Tournament at Colonia Middle School and he had like 30 points in the final.”
It’s funny to think about now because Derkack just finished up his junior year playing at Rutgers and Baker-Mazara is helping lead Auburn into the Final Four, having averaged 8.5 points and 2.8 assists in four NCAA Tournament games.
“I’m so proud of him as a friend,” Derkack said. “No one gave him anything. Some people along the way have helped him, but he’s the one who’s put in the work. He’s as competitive as it gets.”
Baker-Mazara’s hardwood journey – from playing JV as a high school junior to going virtually unrecruited as a senior standout to one of the biggest stages in all of sports – is a lesson for every overlooked, undervalued gym rat that no prospect ranking system can place limits on you.
“The No. 1 thing is for young players to avoid getting caught up in paying attention to who is the so-called ranked guy, who is the guy that’s playing on a certain circuit with AAU,” Colonia coach Jose Rodriguez said. “There are so many kids who were considered a higher-ranked kid than Chad and he is the last one standing, so that has to mean something.”
Evaluators missed it
Rodriguez took the reins at Colonia just before Baker-Mazara’s senior year there.
“You could tell he had some ability,” Rodriguez said. “We started to play a way more up-tempo game and it was like, ‘Woah, who is this 6-foot-7 kid who is handling the ball in transition and knocking down threes and making plays?’”
Baker dominated the Greater Middlesex Conference as a senior, then shined in the statewide North-South All-Star game. But he remained unrated (zero stars) and unranked by the national recruiting evaluators, and his only Division I scholarship offer came from Mississippi Valley State.
“Sometimes (college) coaches evaluating, are they just going based off who is telling them that ‘this is a top-100 guy?’” Rodriguez said. “Are they really doing their homework to get a feeling for which guys have the upside? I was like, wait a minute, this kid is better than what people realize.”
One of the many flaws in the cottage industry of grassroots scouting is that not enough evaluators see players ...
