Knight Watchers

Next Wednesday, Sept. 23, at the Pine Crest School's gymnasium in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a veritable who's who of college basketball coaches will gather to watch Brandon Knight, the nation's top recruit in the Class of 2010, play in an open gym format.

Jim Calhoun will be there. So will John Calipari, Coach K, Jim Boeheim, Bill Self, Rick Barnes, Billy Donovan, Stan Heath and many others -- including, most likely, coaches from Yale and Harvard (Knight, after all, boasts a 4.2 grade-point average).

Pine Crest coach Dave Beckerman, a Guilford resident and former Hamden Hall coach, held a similar open gym last year. Calhoun, Boeheim, Bobby Gonzalez and others were in attendance. But this year's roster is even more impressive.

Knight will make an official visit to Kentucky this weekend, and after next week's open gym, he'll travel to Connecticut, stay at Beckerman's house for a night or two, then make an official visit to UConn. He's already made two unofficials to the school.

Knight has already made an official to Florida, and his others will be Kentucky, UConn, Kansas and Duke. Beckerman doesn't believe that Knight, a 6-3 point guard who averaged 31.8 points per game last season for Pine Crest, will make a commitment this fall. He's likely to wait until the spring.

"There are a lot of variables," Beckerman noted. "He wants to look at who else commits to the schools, how the team does, what's coming back. He wants to see where he fits in."

Suffice to say, Knight should fit in quite well, wherever he chooses. In fact, academically, according to Beckerman, if he went to UConn he'd have 18 credits right off the bat, thanks to all of the AP courses he's taken at Pine Crest (one of the top academic schools in Florida).

Incidentally, Knight will be ESPN on Feb. 15, when Pine Crest takes on Winter Park (which features Doc Rivers' son, another top recruit).