MONTVERDE, Fla. – To stand in the hallways of Montverde Academy is to be serenaded by a multicultural symphony. As uniformed students stroll by, books in hand, they engage in typical adolescent chatter, except this one is a blend of languages from around the globe. More than 80 countries are represented by the 1,400 students who range in grade from pre-kindergarten through post-graduate. English can be heard as well, but it is often clipped and heavily accented.

Because of this diversity, students often downshift to common, secondary languages so they can communicate with one other. One of the most popular choices is French. This made R.J. Barrett’s transition to Montverde much easier when he arrived as a freshman in the fall of 2015. Barrett learned to speak the language while he was growing up in France, where his father, Rowan, played professional basketball. French is also spoken in Barrett’s hometown of Mississauga, Ontario. R.J., which stands for Rowan Jr., speaks English as well, but Montverde is the first school he has attended where that is the primary language. Barrett’s multitudinous tongue, combined with his affable, outgoing personality, puts him at ease in most any situation. “I feel like I can talk to anybody,” he says. “I have a lot of friends. I can hang out with whoever and never feel out of place.”

Barrett’s worldly upbringing has imbued him with curiosity and wonder that is not usually found in teenagers. For example, his eyes light up as he recounts a visit he took last summer to see the pyramids in Egypt. “It was amazing,” he says. “You hear how big they are, but to actually see them, they’re huge. To think that people made that with their bare hands is incredible. I don’t know how someone would do that right now, let alone way back when they built those.”

It is notable that Barrett, 17, is more animated discussing his visit to the pyramids than he is about the reason for his trip to the Middle East. But don’t let that get lost in translation. The 6-foot-6, 180-pound Barrett knows full well the significance of what he accomplished while playing small forward for Team Canada at the FIBA U19 World Cup in Cairo. During a semifinal game against a U.S. team coached by John Calipari, Barrett had 38 points, 13 rebounds and five assists in a 99-87 win. It marked the first time in six years the Americans had lost in that age group. The next day, Barrett scored 18 points to go along with 12 rebounds and four assists in a win over Italy, giving Canada its first men’s youth global title in basketball. For a country that has always been dwarfed by its neighbor to the south, it was an earth-shattering achievement. “Truly historic,” says eight-time NBA All-Star Steve Nash, the patron saint of Canadian basketball and one of Rowan Barrett’s closest friends. “To win the gold and actually beat the United States in any age group has been coveted for so long in Canada.”

Three weeks later, R.J. decided to reclassify academically so he could graduate in the spring of 2018 and thus be eligible for the 2019 NBA draft. On Friday, he will reveal his college choice live on TSN, a Canadian English-language sports network, from among his final candidates of Duke, Kentucky and Oregon. Barrett’s revelation will have major ramifications for the sport, but no one, least of all Barrett, is pretending he will be in college long. Besides being the consensus No. 1 player in the high school class of 2018, Barrett is also widely projected to be the first overall selection in the 2019 NBA draft. That would make him the third Canadian picked No. 1 this decade, after Anthony Bennett (2013) and Andrew Wiggins (2014).

Barrett works hard to make the game seem effortless. He doesn’t burst, he glides; he doesn’t explode, he elevates. He shoots with a smooth lefty stroke, and though he is not a high-percentage jump shooter, he says with quiet confidence, “I can make ’em when I need ’em.” R.J. was 12 when he told his dad he wanted to be a perennial NBA All-Star and a Hall of Famer. He is clearly a prodigious talent, but his greatest gift is his ability to pursue his goals without feeling as if he is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. “My dad always told me, if you’re going to dream big things, you have to put the work into achieving it,” R.J. says. “There’s no point in dreaming small.”

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Nash believes if Rowan Barrett were coming of age in the Toronto suburbs in 2017 instead of 1987, things would have turned out differently. “He was an incredible athlete,” Nash recalls. “He was a 6-5 guy who could get his head at the rim. He was incredibly fast and strong. If he had grown up in Toronto today, he would have played in the NBA for sure.”

Rowan played mostly football and soccer when he was a kid, and he also ran track. He dabbled in basketball, but he was not highly interested in it, partially because he had such little exposure to the pro game. “We didn’t have the NBA in Canada, and I had no clue when the games were on TV,” he says. “You might get one game a week, probably the Lakers and Celtics, but mostly I wasn’t too aware.”

Two things changed his mindset. First, he grew four inches during his freshman year of high school. Second, Michael Jordan happened. Rowan became passionate about basketball, finding a way to get invited to the Five Star Basketball Camp in Pennsylvania and later being selected to play for Canada’s junior national teams. He was competing for the Under 19 squad when he met Nash, a hotshot who was two years younger. “From day one, we had a friendship that was important to me,” Nash says. “He took care of me when I was young, and he didn’t need to.”

Barrett played for St. John’s from 1992-96. He had a decent college career – as a senior he averaged 10.4 points off the bench – but his late start to the game delayed his skill development, and he never caught up. He was also hindered by a foot injury at the end of his senior year. Rowan was invited to a few NBA camps as an undrafted free agent, but he failed to make a roster. So he opted to play overseas.

By that time, he had married his college girlfriend, Kesha Duhaney. Kesha, who hailed from Brooklyn, was a star on the St. John’s track team and came from a family of athletes. Her parents ran for the Jamaican national team. Her sister was a world champion sprinter who competed for Jamaica at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Her brother played football at Maryland. The union between Rowan and Kesha all but ensured that their offspring would hit the DNA lottery. Says Rowan, “Believe me, her family spares no opportunity to let me know that R.J.’s athleticism came from their side.”

Rowan played for teams in Israel, Italy, Argentina, Venezuela, Spain and Greece. Three months after R.J. was born, Rowan played for Canada at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. (The team finished seventh.) With R.J. and his younger brother, Nathan, to consider, Rowan and Kesha decided it would be best for them to settle in one place. They decided on France partly because French is a popular language, especially back home in Canada. While the boys attended a French school, Kesha tutored them in English.

When his career came to an end in 2008, Rowan moved the family to Mississauga, Ontario. R.J. describes the town as a melting pot. “I have an Indian neighbor. I have a black neighbor. There a lot of different types of people living there,” he says. Not surprisingly, R.J. was a naturally gifted athlete, but unlike his dad he was always the tallest among his friends. Also unlike his dad, he grew up at a time when the NBA was becoming enormously popular in Canada. It started when the Dream Team conquered the world at the 1992 Olympics. Three years later, the NBA opened expansion franchises in Toronto and Vancouver. “You saw hoops going up in driveways at an alarming rate,” Nash says. “These young players got to watch the NBA every night and become inspired.” Throw in the advent of the internet, which exposed Canadian boys to images of the NBA’s biggest stars, and the basketball world suddenly felt a lot smaller.

As he had done, Rowan wanted his son to play multiple sports. However, when R.J. was having those conversations about dreaming big, he told his dad he wanted to commit fulltime to hoops. “The loftiness of his goals really took me aback,” Rowan says. “What do you tell your kid at 12 when he tells you something like that and you know the chances are so remote?”

In an effort to test his son’s resolve, Rowan took R.J. to a gym so he could play against older kids who were among the best in the area, including Jamal Murray, who would star at Kentucky and now plays for the Denver Nuggets. R.J. was thoroughly outclassed. He was quiet on the car ride home, but when he walked through the door, he hugged his mom and broke down in tears. When Rowan asked R.J. how he wanted to handle the situation, R.J. replied, “I want to work harder.”

It was a seminal moment, and Rowan knew it. “He was always long and lean and running and jumping. He had all these natural abilities,” Rowan says, “When he showed that willingness to really get after it and train and do things that kids at that age usually don’t want to do, that’s the point I started thinking this could be really special.”

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Canada has not qualified for the Olympics in men’s basketball since those 2000 Sydney Games. Nash wanted to be part of the effort to change that, so in 2012 he agreed to be general manager of the senior national team. Rowan serves as assistant GM. The country’s commitment to identify and develop young basketball talent provided R.J.’s generation with opportunities that Rowan’s never had. R.J. was 14 when he played on the Under 16 team, and he was 15 when he played for the Under 17 team at the World Championships in Spain.

When it came to finding quality competition in high school, however, R.J. had to look south of the border. This is one area in which Canada remains underdeveloped. R.J. chose Montverde partly because the team already included his good friend and fellow Canadian, Simi Shittu. (Shittu has since left Montverde and now plays for Vermont Academy.) Mostly, though, R.J. knew he would be challenged. Over the past decade, Montverde has become one of the top prep basketball programs in the country. Behind a team led by D’Angelo Russell and Ben Simmons, the school won the first of three consecutive national championships in 2013. Montverde coach Kevin Boyle knew of R.J.’s reputation when he visited during the summer of ’15, but he also had a loaded team. He told R.J. he would begin the season as the 15th player on the roster. If he was going to move up, he would have to earn it.

It didn’t take long. In December of his freshman year, R.J. scored 31 points in a quarterfinal loss to Lonzo Ball-led Chino Hills (Calif.) High School at the City of Ponds Classic in Fort Myers, Fla. As a sophomore, he led Montverde to a 27-5 record and a No. 7 ranking in USA Today’s final Super 25 poll. Last February, he was named MVP at the Basketball Without Borders Global Camp, an international showcase held during the NBA’s All-Star weekend. In April, he was the youngest player at the Nike Hoop Summit, which pits a team of U.S. high schoolers against an international squad.

After leading Nike’s EYBL Circuit in scoring at 28.0 points per game this summer, Barrett went to Egypt and led Canada to the gold. Though he is still not an efficient long-range shooter (he shot 23.8 percent from 3-point range in Cairo), he has worked hard to improve that part of his game, which paid off when he made a variety of jump shots against the Americans in the semifinal. “R.J. had it going,” Calipari said afterward. “I needed to try some different things, but the reality was one kid really went crazy, and then the rest of their kids did what they did. So hats off to them.”

Asked if he was nervous before the game against the U.S., Barrett replies, “Nah, never. I think I work harder than everybody else, so there’s nothing to be nervous about.” Though he was happy with the victory, he didn’t realize the impact until the team was greeted upon its return home by hundreds of people at the airport. “Family, friends, TV cameras. Everyone was there,” Barrett says. “It made us feel like we did something really special.”

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Shortly after R.J. began his freshman year at Montverde, he struck up a conversation with a teammate who hailed from the Republic of Georgia. They soon discovered that they had a mutual friend, a boy from Georgia whom R.J. had become buddies with while their fathers played together in France. Knowing how small the world can be has not only informed Barrett’s personality, but also the way he plays. “I think it gives him a calm,” Nash says. “The more you’ve seen, the more knowledge and wisdom you have, it gives you poise and calm under pressure.”

Nash hopes it won’t be long before young Canadians can find quality high school competition at home. In the meantime, he is optimistic his country can return to the Olympics. Canada has the second-most number of players in the NBA. The team it would send to Tokyo in 2020 could include Andrew Wiggins, Kelly Olynyk and Tristan Thompson, as well as Barrett and two other Canadians who are top 50 players in the high school class of 2018. “I’d be the young guy on that team,” R.J. says, “but I want to be on it for sure.”

First things first. Barrett has a big announcement to make on Friday. It will be another seminal moment, further elevating this child of the world as he continues to find his voice. Pay attention, America. This could be really special.