Mike Jones is always on the lookout for fresh talent. As the boys’ basketball coach at DeMatha Catholic High School in nearby Hyattsville, Md.—one of the nation’s top high school basketball programs—he’s got to be.
About six years ago, when another DeMatha teacher told Jones about a twelve year-old on his son’s middle school team who was turning heads, Jones went to check the kid out.
“When I went, I thought [the boy] was older,” Jones recalled. “I thought he was older playing with younger guys.”
The kid was Austin Freeman, now six-foot-four, 210 pounds and the marquee freshman guard for the Hoyas. Back then, Freeman didn’t look physically older than the other players; Jones described him as being “lanky, very young-looking” with a “baby-face”.
What made him suspect the boy was older was Freeman’s basketball IQ, that rare ability to read the floor and know when to dish the ball, drive or fade back for the jumper. Senior point guard Jon Wallace has it in spades. According to Jones, so did the seventh-grade Freeman.
“As talented as he was, most times you get a young guy like that, he wants to score every time he gets the ball,” Jones said. “Austin was very unselfish. It just seemed like he knew what the game was all about.”
From that moment on, Jones attended almost all of Freeman’s middle school games. He wasn’t the only one; coaches from other local schools also made a point of following Freeman’s progress through middle school. But when it came time for Freeman to choose a high school, it wasn’t a hard decision: he would attend DeMatha. Among his motivations, Freeman cited DeMatha’s athletics, the academics and its family environment—nearly a year after their son graduated, Freeman’s parents still go to DeMatha games and even attended the team’s senior dinner last week.
Jones, who also teaches Public Speaking and Communications at DeMatha, helped Freeman out whenever he was having trouble with his schoolwork.
“He was basically just like a second father,” Freeman said.
DeMatha couldn’t have a better basketball pedigree: from 1957 to 2002 the Stags were coached by Morgan Wootten, who earned a 1,274-192 record, five national championships and sent twelve players to the NBA, among them current North Carolina State coach Sidney Lowe and Cleveland Cavaliers General Manager Danny Ferry.
“Going to a program like that basically just prepared me for college,” Freeman said.
In his senior year, Freeman led DeMatha to its third straight conference championship, averaging 23.1 points and seven boards per game. When Freeman joined the Hoyas, fresh from their Final Four run, he faced high expectations from Georgetown’s fans, nation-wide scouts and the talking heads of college basketball.
“It was my opinion that Austin Freeman … was smart enough and savvy enough and had enough basketball talent … to [someday] be in the hunt for the Big East Player of the Year award,” Dave Telep, Director of College Basketball Recruiting for Scout.com, said. “I think he’s that good.”
Scout.com, one of the two main websites that follows high school basketball players, ranked Freeman the #3 shooting guard in the nation for his recruiting class.
Jones also expected big things from Freeman.
“I think I even predicted [his success] to him sometime this summer,” Jones said. “I said to him, ‘I think you’ll be starting by January.’”
A day before the New Year, Jones’ prediction came true. In a 27 point blow-out of Fordham, Freeman had his warm-ups off before tip-off for the first time in his college career, taking Patrick Ewing Jr.’s starting spot. He shot 67 percent from the field and contributed 12 points for the third-highest point total on the team.
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Freeman’s love of basketball began at inter-office games that his dad, Austin Freeman Sr., played in when Freeman was around four years old.
“I used to sit around with a basketball in my hands, just trying to shoot,” Freeman said. “I just fell in love with it after that.”
These informal games were a far cry from the games Freeman Sr., who grew up in Liberia, played in when he was younger. As a junior in high school in 1977, Freeman Sr. was invited to try out for, and made, Liberia’s national team. Despite his success on the court, his education was still paramount.
“I never got to travel out of the country with the [national] team because I was in school and my parents wouldn’t let me,” he said.
Freeman Sr. didn’t play basketball when he came to the United States in 1980, opting instead to focus on his civil engineering studies at Howard University. Stories of Freeman Sr.’s accomplishments on the court endured, though. Growing up, Freeman heard about “stuff [Freeman Sr.] used to do in games that made people go wild … just basically dunking on people and making game winning shots, stuff like that.
“I’m not even close to how he used to play when he was young,” Freeman added.
This kind of modest statement is typical for Freeman, who, despite his dominance on the court, is soft-spoken and shy in person. Though he gradually assumed a leadership role on DeMatha’s team throughout his four years, Freeman was never an outspoken leader.
“He has great leadership skills, not so much vocally,” Jeff Peterson, a former teammate of Freeman’s who now plays for the University of Iowa, said. “He’ll lead by example.”
Freeman grew more vocal over time and by their senior year, Freeman and Peterson, who had bonded as the only freshmen on varsity, were team captains.
“Whatever he said or whatever I said, that’s the way it went down,” Peterson said.
Jones agreed that many people see Freeman as a quiet presence, though he noted that if Freeman is around people he’s comfortable with, a humorous, playful side can emerge.
“You put him in the locker room and he knows there are no adults around, he lets his hair down a little bit,” Jones said.
However reserved Freeman may have been off the court, he didn’t shy away from stepping up to make big plays when DeMatha needed him. He hit three game-winning shots in his freshman year alone.
The next year, in the final of the Gonzaga D.C. Classic tournament, the Stags were tied at 51 against hosts Gonzaga—another D.C. area basketball powerhouse—with seconds left on the clock. Jones called for an isolation play designed to give Freeman the chance to take his man one-on-one. Freeman pulled up to drill a three as the seconds drained off the clock, the final score 54-51. The play that Jones had drawn up was called “victory.”
“He came through,” Jerai Grant, another former teammate of Freeman’s who now plays for Clemson, said, calling the Gonzaga game “one for the books.” “He’s just a clutch player if I’ve ever seen one.”
That season, the Stags went on to win their first conference title in three years. During the next season, Freeman’s junior year, he averaged 17.9 points, 7.1 rebounds, and 3.4 assists and led his team to another title and a 34-1 record.
In Jones’ mind, Freeman’s greatest strengths as a player were, and are, his versatility and his efficiency.
“Certain things you can’t argue,” Jones said. “Stats like that, shooting 80 percent from the free throw line, over 40 from three, over or around 60 from two, nobody does that. [College] seniors don’t do that.”
As his team kept improving, Freeman got better as well, dedicating each off-season to improving some aspect of his game.
When asked who had the biggest impact on Freeman at DeMatha, Peterson was emphatic.
“The biggest influence on Austin was Austin,” he said. “The thing about him was he just wanted it. Anytime … you want something that bad, you’re going to get it.”
Jones echoed the sentiment. “We could take credit for coaching him,” he said, “but [Austin] gets all the credit for improving himself as an individual.”
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While Freeman first garnered serious national attention as a freshman at DeMatha, the Amateur Athletics Union, a premier amateur sports league, also played a role in his early career.
When Freeman was around ten or eleven, Preston Martin, the coach of the elite P.G. Jaguars team that included Seattle Sonics rookie Kevin Durant and Kansas State freshman Michael Beasley, unsuccessfully tried to recruit him. (Martin also tried to recruit Hoya freshman Chris Wright, not realizing that his dad was his coach.)
“He was tenacious,” Martin, who is also the governor of the Potomac Valley AAU, said of Freeman. “He never saw a rebound that he didn’t like.”
Though Freeman passed up the chance to play with Beasley for the Jaguars, playing for the Maryland Crusaders instead, the two players met up as members of the D.C. Assault, another AAU team. Nolan Smith, now a freshman guard for fourth-ranked Duke, also played for the Assault. Freeman had played with Smith when Freeman was eight or nine, and with Beasley at Kittering Middle School. On the Assault, Freeman, Beasley and Smith formed the core of a dominating team.
“They just had a crew,” Telep said. “They beat people and beat people badly on the high school circuit.”
Freeman started alongside older players for the Assault and “made his bones on the AAU circuit,” according to Telep.
He played with the same elite players at the 2007 McDonald’s All-American game, an all-star exhibition game for America’s best high school players. Freeman’s teammates included Wright and Smith, along with future Big East opponents Johnny Flynn and Donte Greene, both committed to Syracuse.
“It was fun,” Freeman, not one to waste words, said. “The whole McDonald’s experience is fun.”
Freeman, whose compact six-four frame conceals a powerful spring, got the chance to showcase his dunking ability in the McDonald’s Slam Dunk competition, making it to the final round with Beasley and Oklahoma’s Blake Griffin. Freeman wowed the crowd with his last dunk, starting off lined up on the baseline outside the three-point arc and bouncing the ball high in the air. Then, he ran in and as he took off, grabbed the ball and reverse-dunked it with such force that it went through the hoop once, spun around in the net and went through again.
Freeman’s four-point play earned him 49 out of 50 points for a total score of 90, one point short of first place.
“Basically I just winged it,” Freeman said later of the dunking competition. “I didn’t really think about what I was going to do. I just went out and did what I had to do, one off the top of my head.”
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Georgetown had a lot going for it when Freeman was considering colleges (he committed during his junior year). Its academic reputation, which Freeman Sr. said was his son’s number one criterion for picking a college, was a huge draw.
“It’s all about working hard on and off the court so at the end of four years you’re able to walk out with a degree,” he said.
Georgetown was also close to home—a half-hour drive from Hyattsville—so Freeman’s parents would have no trouble coming to games. Freeman’s parents are still engaged in his life, though he said his dad doesn’t give him as much advice as he did in high school.
“He said I’m in college so I gotta learn for myself now,” Freeman said.
Basketball-wise, the decision also made sense. Jones and Telep both pointed out that Freeman’s style of play and his tendency to let plays unfold instead of forcing them fit perfectly with Georgetown’s style. The Hoyas’ Princeton offense thrives on players like Freeman that are versatile enough to exploit all the options offered, but patient enough to wait for the offense to click.
“[Freeman] can get 25 for you without blinking an eye and he does it without having to dominate the ball,” Telep said. “When you can do that at Georgetown, you’re going to be a big-time player in their system.”
“A lot of players [as talented as] him feel like they have something to prove every time they go out to play,” Peterson said. “He just lets the game come to him.”
Sometimes that kind of patience can lead to games like the Hoyas’ nail-biter against Villanova, in which Freeman attempted just two field goals, missing both. But, in spite of a recent shooting slump, Freeman is averaging nine points per game so far this year, making him the fifth most proficient scorer on a top-heavy team.
“I’m not surprised,” Coach John Thompson III said when asked about Freeman’s success. “The game comes very easily to him.”
There’s no question that Freeman’s performance has dropped off lately, at least according to the stats sheet. While he was shooting 67.2 percent from the field as of late January, making him the most efficient-shooting freshman guard in the country, he’s shot 13-for-40 overall in the past seven games. Jones, however, is not worried.
“He’s in a little shooting slump right now but he’s an accurate shooter,” he said, noting that Freeman’s versatility allowed him to contribute not just as a scorer but as a defensive player and a facilitator for other players as well.
“His role is going to be whatever the team needs from him in order to win,” Jones said.
“Austin Freeman, since the day he arrived at Georgetown, has been a main component of what they’re trying to do,” Telep said. “Austin next year will be a guy that they’re going to count on even more heavily to ease the scoring pressure on a guy like [Greg] Monroe [the #1 recruit of the class of 2008] or Chris Wright, and I don’t think it’s a problem.”
Despite Freeman’s recent slump, as soon as Wright’s foot injury heals, Jones said he sees Freeman and Wright becoming a duo of complementary guards who will have a considerable impact on Georgetown’s future success.
“Assuming both of them are around and healthy long enough,” he said, “they’ll one day will be known as, I think, the best backcourt in college basketball.”
Freeman’s dedication to improving his game will make him an increasingly valuable member of the Hoyas, Jones said, citing his work during the off-season at DeMatha.
“Every summer he’d say, ‘Okay, I’m gonna be a better ball handler this summer’ and he added that to his game,” Jones said. “’I’m gonna be a better three point shooter,’ he added that to his game. ‘I’m going to be better at the in-between game,’ he added that to his game.
“Whatever he may lack this year, when he comes back to Georgetown next year,” Jones added, “I can almost guarantee that it will be improved because he won’t let anything just linger.”
