BRADENTON, Fla. — Jalen Carethers, four weeks removed from his final game as a basketball player at Radford, was at a loss. Sports had always come easily to him, but now he was standing in the middle of a multipurpose field at IMG Academy, cradling an oblong ball in his hands and doing his best to figure out how to make this foreign object fly.

“Where on the foot do you want to hit it?” he asked.

Michael Ablett, a national talent manager for the Australian Football League, advised Carethers to snap his leg and make contact with his forefoot. The idea, or at least the hope, was to keep his foot stiff so that he would generate enough force to send the ball end over end on a smooth parabola.

“All right,” Ablett said as he took a few generous steps in the general direction of safety, “let’s have a bit of a go at it.”

A steady rain began to fall. Carethers took a deep breath, squared his 6-foot-7 frame and drop-kicked the ball, which wobbled toward the sky with the ferocity of a bat trapped in an attic. It was, if nothing else, a start.