The phone call began like so many others Farmingdale State coach Erik Smiles has received before.

A man whom Smiles had never met called in May 2011 to gauge his interest in a pair of junior college prospects searching for a four-year school. One was the man's son. The other was his son's teammate.

"You get these calls a million times, so I didn't think much of it," Smiles said. "He's like, 'My son is a guard,' and I'm thinking, 'OK, a guard.' And then he says the other kid is a 7-footer. At that point, I almost rolled off my couch in shock. I'm like, 'Holy Jesus. You have a 7-footer?' At our level you just don't hear that."

Intrigued yet skeptical, Smiles invited the man and the two players to meet with him on campus the following morning. Then he spent the next hour scouring the web for any tidbits of information he could glean about his mystery visitors.

What he learned was 5-foot-10 Ryan Davis and 7-foot-1 AJ Matthews were teammates at Broward Community College in Florida during the 2010-11 season and originally planned to spend the next two years together at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Matthews averaged 19 points and 11 rebounds at Broward and drew interest from Cincinnati and Oklahoma State, which made him absurdly overqualified to play for a Division III program like Farmingdale that competed against teams whose tallest players were 6-foot-5.

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When Chuck Davis brought his son and Matthews to meet with the Farmingdale coaches and tour the campus the next morning, Smiles asked why the two players had scrapped their plans to go to FDU. The elder Davis explained that both failed to qualify academically to play Division I or II basketball, so he was scrambling to help them find a Division III school near their New York homes with affordable tuition and space on its roster.

Smiles wasted little time offering the younger Davis and Matthews a spot on the team, but he still didn't fully grasp his good fortune until he saw them play in person for the first time in a summer-league game at the famed West 4th Street courts in Greenwich Village. It was then that Smiles realized Matthews wasn't some plodding, mechanical big man. He's an explosive athlete with soft touch, quick feet and baseline-to-baseline speed most guards can't match.

"About halfway through the game, I was like, 'Whoa, this is unreal,'" Smiles recalled. "AJ was the best player on the court by far. That's when I realized he was legit."

•••••

In the 18 months since Matthews chose to come to Farmingdale, he has only validated Smiles' first impression.

He earned NABC DIII All-American honors last season after averaging 22.4 points and 16.3 rebounds per game and shooting 61.4 percent from the field. He has solidified himself as early favorite for Division III Player of the Year so far this season, increasing his scoring average to 27.2 points per game while still contributing 15.4 rebounds and 4.0 blocks.

Matthews' combination of production and potential has caught the attention of a handful of NBA franchises. Scouts from the Washington Wizards, Brooklyn Nets, New York Knicks and Indiana Pacers have arranged to watch Matthews play this month, a surreal experience for a little-known Long Island program and an unlikely opportunity for a kid far removed from college basketball's big stage.

"It's proof that scouts are going to find you no matter what school you're at," Matthews said. "I was worried that by coming to a Division III school I wasn't going to get the exposure I needed. I thought people would say he's playing against Division III kids. He's supposed to put up big numbers. But scouts are still coming to see me play and I appreciate them giving me the opportunity."

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