Cam Whitmore, a potential top-5 NBA draft pick from Odenton, was never allowed to take the easy path
Off he’ d go to the same Mount Royal Recreation sweatbox where Carmelo Anthony learned to fight for what was his. Not at some Washington- area powerhouse where every kid aspired to be a McDonald’ s All American. Myron Whitmore saw the requisite desire and physical skill in his son, Cam, but he thought the boy needed confrontation, constant confrontation.
Instead of removing obstacles from his son’s path, the father added them.
The 8-year-old boy yearned to play in the NBA someday? Great, he’d practice dribbling with his offhand and attack, always attack, in a claustrophobic gym with a concrete floor and no air conditioning.
Time to graduate to AAU ball? Off he’d go to the same Mount Royal Recreation sweatbox where Carmelo Anthony learned to fight for what was his.
High school? Not at some Washington-area powerhouse where every kid aspired to be a McDonald’s All American. Try Archbishop Spalding, where the classes would be tough and the wins hard to come by.
Myron Whitmore saw the requisite desire and physical skill in his son, Cam, but he thought the boy needed confrontation, constant confrontation. Otherwise, he might lose his edge.
“I have a lot of, I call them philosophies, kind of old school,” Myron said. “I’ve always told him, ‘You don’t want to be among the best, you want to play against the best.’”
On Thursday, the younger Whitmore, an Odenton native, could be picked as high as No. 4 overall in the NBA draft. He charges to the rim with malice, guards men large and small and splashes the net with an ever-improving jump shot. He won’t turn 19 until next month.
“I have that alpha-dog mentality,” he told reporters at the NBA draft combine last month.
The hard road he and his father agreed upon more than a decade ago turned out to be the correct one.
Whitmore also played football and swam in elementary school, but one day, when he was 8, he told his dad it would be all basketball all the time from then on. Myron, a retired Air National Guardsmen, is a meticulous researcher by nature. He examined the options and chose Rhythm Dribble as the program that would shape his son’s game.
Parents referred to coach Darryl Adams’ training site in Jessup as “the warehouse.”
“No wood floor, no AC, no heat in the wintertime,” Adams said. “It was 15 feet wide by 125 feet. The kids would run into the walls, and it just created an environment that said, ‘Hard work wins.’”
“I’m expecting a gym,” Myron recalled, laughing. “And it was not a gym. But, it was the most effective spot to go to.”
Adams had the 50 or so kids divided into three groups by skill and experience. Whitmore started with the beginners, while most of his friends practiced complex ball-handling combinations in the advanced section. Boom, boom, boom, he pounded the ball into the concrete with his left hand as he watched his pals have all the fun.
“He did not like that,” his father remembered. “It took him three months to get up to that spot, and he worked his butt off because he knew that’s where he wanted to be. He was always competitive; it’s just something internal that’s with him.”
Adams quickly told the elder Whitmore his son could be special.
“I train young basketball players, and every now and again you get a kind of athlete that has that perfect combination of nerve, of size, of speed, of reckless abandon,” Adams said. “And then he had an attitude that was conducive to learning. It was pretty raw, but he was all of that at 8.”
Whitmore’s size gave him a rebounding advantage in youth games, but he was still a clumsy dribbler. Adams didn’t care; he told the big kid to grab the ball off the glass and push it up court. A future NBA wing was born.
Around the time Whitmore reached the eighth grade and kept making all-star teams at every camp he attended, Myron began to see what Adams had from the start. Maybe his son’s goal of playing at a Division I school and beyond was not so far-fetched.
As Whitmore matured, Adams expanded his lessons, teaching him to shoot off the dribble as a complement to his take-no-prisoners drives. Every shot needed to go straight, high and far enough to get over the rim. That was their checklist.
The old warehouse meant so much to Whitmore that even when he was a senior All-American at Spalding, he would meet Adams for 5:30 a.m. workouts before rushing off to class.
When it came time for Myron and Whitmore’s mother, Beth, to choose a high school, Spalding was hardly the obvious destination. Its basketball program had fallen on hard times since the early 2000s, when future NBA standout Rudy Gay dunked on all-comers in the Baltimore Catholic League.
“I told him I wanted him to get a good academic background,” Myron said. “I wanted him to stay all four years. I wanted him to have some stability, and I was not chasing a basketball program.”
Whitmore’s prep career began inauspiciously, with a broken tibia that sidelined him his entire freshman year. In the wake of that disappointment, coach Josh Pratt arrived to take over.
Pratt restricted his recovering young star to 20 minutes a game at the start of his sophomore season. Like a young Michael Jordan, pushing against the minutes limit he faced after he broke his foot in his second NBA season, Whitmore bristled.
“He didn’t like it,” Pratt said.
Come playoff time, he unleashed his pent-up fury in an upset of No. 1-seeded Gilman, scoring 34 points to go with 10 rebounds.
“He came down on the wing against their 6-foot-9 kid, and he just kept rising,” Pratt said, the awe still in his voice. “You could just tell he was going to be unbelievable, and he took off from there.”
In the summers, Whitmore went to Baltimore to play for Team Melo instead of Washington’s glitzier Team Takeover, where most of his peers gravitated. If he was underrated on national prospect lists, he took that as motivation to dunk on the guys above him.
In the same spirit as Myron, Pratt tried to make Whitmore uncomfortable, limiting the number of dribbles he could take in practice and ordering the other kids to triple-team him. Whitmore would just crack a grin and go harder.
“He got better and better and better,” Pratt said. “He went above and beyond, outside of what we were doing at Spalding. He’s so talented that some of what he does looks easy. But he put the work in.”
At every turn, Whitmore blew past outside expectations. He was one of the lower-ranked prospects going into the 2022 McDonald’s All American Game, but he led the victorious East team with 19 points and eight rebounds. He started out as a Team USA reserve in last summer’s FIBA Under-18 Americas Championship but was named tournament Most Valuable Player after he scored a team-high 30 points in a decisive 102-60 victory over Brazil.
Kyle Neptune did not become Villanova’s coach until April 2022, so he had not recruited Whitmore. That summer romp left a strong impression, however, as did Whitmore’s first few weeks on campus.
“He had one of the all-time greatest summers I have ever seen,” Neptune said. “I was in shock just with his talent level. There were things he did that I, personally, had never seen before. He is so fast. If we did a sprint, two or three lengths of the court, by the end, he would finish 10 to 12 steps in front of the next fastest guy. You add his physicality — he injured three or four of our guys through no fault of his own. He’s shooting the ball, someone bumps into him and breaks his nose. He dunks and comes down, cracks someone on the head, concussion. He’s such a unique specimen.”
Before Whitmore played a minute for the Wildcats, Neptune knew he was probably dealing with a one-and-done talent.
A thumb injury that required surgery delayed the start of Whitmore’s freshman season, but he hit his stride with a 26-point game against Xavier in January and was playing his best ball in late February and early March before Villanova’s season ended with a Big East Tournament loss to Creighton.
“I feel like we truly just threw him out there and hoped for the best,” Neptune said, referring to the developmental challenges presented by Whitmore’s injury. “So when people say ups and downs, what this kid did coming back from injury as a freshman — most kids are still in high school at his age — what this kid did was truly amazing.”
Whitmore added enough muscle that his legs and shoulders no longer fit in the suit a tailor had prepared for him before the season. He no longer overlooked details on defense.
The NBA beckoned.
The 6-foot-6, 235-pound Whitmore began his preparations for predraft workouts at the P3 training center in California before moving to Houston, where he has worked six days a week with a private coach named Aaron Miller. They have drilled into detailed scenarios Whitmore might encounter in the NBA — creating space against a pick-and-roll defender, making sure each dribble is efficient, identifying go-to moves for late in the shot clock. Before Whitmore travels to work out for a specific team — he has auditioned for those holding picks Nos. 3 through No. 7 — Miller hands him a report on that franchise’s needs and on which skills he might want to emphasize.
He has demonstrated not just his power, speed and 40.5-inch vertical leap but his versatility as a ballhandler and that improved jump shot.
“He’s somebody that could fit in on any team,” said Miller, who works with NBA veterans such as Patrick Beverley and Malik Beasley. “He’s naturally gifted, but he’s also someone that can see something, do it a few times and then make a habit of it.”
Recent mock drafts have him going anywhere between No. 4 overall to the Houston Rockets and No. 9 overall to the Utah Jazz. ESPN analyst Jonathan Givony praised his “tremendous physical tools and improving shot-making prowess.”
When his parents and former coaches check-in, Whitmore, never the loudest character, says he’s enjoying the whirlwind. After all, this was what he wanted, the destination he had in mind as he took on all those obstacles his dad set up.
“Just to see it come to fruition, knowing the ups and downs he had to go through,” Myron said. “There’s nothing that’s going to stop him from wanting to do it.”
2023 NBA draft
Thursday, 8 p.m.
TV: ESPN
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