Think you’ve got it tough?

It’s March Madness Eve. As you read this with your breakfast, kids like you will be scribbling incomprehensible place names on coffee-stained pieces of scrap. The process is about as painless as a Mansfield midterm.

Who to pick? Loyalties clash with realities. In other words, if you hail from Niagara, there’s still no way you’re writing the Purple Eagles into the Sweet Sixteen.

For hoops fan Will Frank ’06, busting the bracket of the 2005 NCAA Tournament is a whole different ballgame.

“Sadly,” says the Dunster House junior, “I’ll have Syracuse losing to Duke, probably. Reverse psychology.”

Frank is an unassuming fellow. He’s tall and athletic, but you wouldn’t necessarily pin him for a basketball player. He doesn’t play organized ball, not even JV—“too lazy,” he says—but takes care of his work like any normal Harvard student would.

He’s no normal Harvard student.

“There are people who you can say, ‘I played with Hakim Warrick’ and it means nothing to them,” Frank says, grinning. “Which is a shame.”

Lest you belong to the unlucky few, let’s just say that Hakim Warrick is, with apologies to Ron Burgundy, kind of a big deal. In sports fan circles, at least, the immensely talented Syracuse forward belongs to the pantheon of Household Names.

Warrick could be a top-5 pick in this summer’s NBA Draft. Within months, he’ll be a multi-millionaire. On the court, the 6’8 forward’s seven-foot wingspan—Warrick has “go-go gadget arms,” says Frank—has sent opponents’ shots off course with all the reliability of a bullet train.

“Yeah he would block me,” Frank says. “All the time.”

“But actually,” he adds, “the first time I ever played against him, I didn’t think he’d be that good. And I drove to the lane that summer. And he just swatted the hell out of me.”

Indeed. In the corner of Dunster House lives a living wonder—the Forrest Gump of March Madness, the Kevin Bacon of hoops stars.

At Friends Central, a small Quaker high school in Philadelphia, Frank started on a team that turned out four NCAA Division I hoops phenoms, two Division II standouts, and three Division III players.

His senior year, he captained a team whose point guard was Mustafa Shakur, now the starter at point for Arizona, a title contender in the Chicago region. That same year, his team’s biggest rival was Germantown Academy, whose two starters were Florida star Matt Walsh and Duke regular Lee Melchionni.