Grade-A talent
Randle among best in classroom, on court
Craig DeVrieze | Posted: Saturday, November 21, 2009
JEFF COOK Rock Island junior standout Chasson Randle ranks atop his class and is one of the nation's elite basketball prospects. (Jeff Cook/Quad-City Times)
If the choice is finishing calculus homework or taking a call from Coach K at the Gwen and Willie Randle residence in Rock Island ... Well, Chasson Randle can do that math.
"You have got to turn it off until (the homework) gets done," the blossoming Rock Island High School basketball star said of his increasingly busy cell phone. "That's the rule of the house. You handle the phone calls after that."
No, sir. Academics are no game in the Randle household. But Chasson, the junior Rocky hoops standout and object of many a college recruiter's affections, treats them that way.
"I look at school as a basketball game," he said. "The A is a win. B? You did OK, but you could always do better."
Randle couldn't do any better than he is doing in the classroom right now. He carries a 4.0 grade-point average and shares the No. 1 rank in his junior class, said his basketball coach and academic counselor Thom Sigel.
"Obviously, it has been stressed to him for a lot of years because he understands the importance of academics, and it also speaks to the fact he is a driven individual," Sigel said. "The things you see on the basketball court carry over.
"Those are things you hope they carry into life."
Courting success
Randle's on-court report card is no less impressive.
Already a two-year starter for Sigel's Rocks, he is ranked by Scout.com as the 13th best junior shooting guard prospect in the nation and has attracted college scholarship offers from virtually every Big Ten school, plus interest from programs such as Kansas, Duke and Stanford.
In June, Randle won a gold medal representing the U.S. in the FIBA Americas Under-16 Championships in Argentina, and he also will represent his country in next summer's Under-17 World Championships in Germany.
His focus this winter is helping his Rocks get three steps beyond where their season ended last year, with Randle having fouled out early in a 60-59 overtime loss in the Class 3A state quarterfinals.
"Being on the bench at the end of the game, I feel like I let my team down and my city down," said Randle, whose Rocks enter the season as a the favorite in the Western Big Six Conference. "I'm looking forward to this year. Once you've been somewhere, it's like the second go-around. You want to go at it harder than the last time.
"State championship," he declared. "That's the goal every year."
Staying on top
That's not the only goal, of course.
Randle is focused on staying atop his class, a mission Sigel suspects will grow more difficult with the junior now engrossed in Rock Island's advanced curriculum and with college recruiters turning up the heat with nightly phone calls and regular in-school visits.
"The other kids are very smart, too, and they are not dealing with everything else," said the coach. "It is going to impact him a little bit."
Randle hopes to play his way through it all.
"That's my goal," he said of staying No. 1.
Gwen Randle said her son so far has been successful at balancing a busy schedule against getting the job done in the classroom.
"Chasson has had a pretty active schedule since age 7," she said, noting her son was involved in grade school and junior high sports while also participating in the Metro Youth Program drum corps and both the MYP and church choirs.
"He has been able to stay organized," she said. "Our philosophy was, ?If the homework isn't done, everything else is on the backburner.'"
The Randles do not demand, or even expect, As or Bs from Chasson and his sister Khaliyah, an honor roll seventh-grader at Edison Junior High. They only ask for honest effort.
Good grades just seem to follow.
It also didn't hurt that Chasson was and is a naturally bright and curious kid, his mother said. Plus, he wants to be challenged in school.
In junior high, his mother noted, Chasson asked to be moved into advanced math classes because the answers were coming too easy.
"Just totally curious," mother said of son. "That's a good way to sum it up."
Finishing up
Chasson has remained intellectually curious and academically driven, even as his basketball star has ascended.
"It's just something that is important to me," he said. "I understand basketball is my first true love. But school is important to me, too."
He is sifting through scholarship offers from Illinois, Iowa, Purdue, Wisconsin, Ohio State, Iowa State, Michigan, DePaul, Miami (Fla.) and Florida State with a keen eye on their basketball programs.
But he hasn't lost sight of the classroom component.
Randle said he wouldn't rule out leaving college early if a first-round NBA Draft siren sounded, but he knows he won't go through life without a college degree.
"My parents have stressed that if basketball doesn't work out, you have to have something to fall back on," he said, noting his fallback goals are medicine or teaching. "Getting it done in school is the only way to have something to fall back on."
