How a moms love helped Dylan Harper become top basketball recruit in Class of 2024

NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. — The game was only a few minutes old, and already the New York Renaissance, aka the Rens, were way behind. It was the second day of pool play at Nike’s Peach Jam, and the Rens’ opponent, MOKAN Elite, were raining in 3-pointers, including one that accidentally banked in at the halftime buzzer, en route to a commanding 31-14 lead. Sitting in her customary seat at the top of the bleachers, wearing a gray T-shirt and Yankees cap, Maria Harper watched the debacle in quiet disbelief. It was not until late in the second quarter, when a questionable call went against the Rens, that she stood up to state her objection. Then she sat and resumed her stewing.

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“Do you consider yourself a tiger mom?” she was asked.

She smiled ruefully and replied, “I’m a tired mom.”

Indeed, it was a miracle she was awake at all. Maria had spent the previous week in Hungary, where her son, Dylan, the Rens’ starting point guard, was playing for Team USA at the U19 Men’s World Cup. After the tournament ended on Sunday, Maria and a friend left at 3 a.m. to drive to Budapest, where they boarded a flight to Munich and caught a connection to JFK Airport in New York City. Upon landing, Maria boarded another flight to Orlando, where her daughter, Mia, was competing in a dance competition. She stayed to watch Mia’s performance on Wednesday morning, then drove six hours to North Augusta, where she arrived an hour before the Rens’ game tipped off at 7:30.

The globetrotting schedule was extreme even by Maria’s standards, but her dedication was hardly unusual. When Dylan and his siblings were growing up in New Jersey, their father, Ron Sr., was finishing off his 15-year NBA career with the Los Angeles Lakers. Maria pulled off triple duty as a working single mom and basketball coach, first as the director of a local grassroots program called Ring City, and later as the girls’ varsity high school coach. She is currently an assistant on the boys’ team at Don Bosco Prep in Ramsey, N.J., where Dylan is about to enter his senior season. Whether it was a school event, a dance competition, a practice or a game, Maria has always been right there, encouraging her kids, protecting them, and instilling her toughness and love of competition. “She’s always been like that,” Dylan says. “Just trying to support all of us the best she can.”

The Rens finally woke up in the second half, but their comeback fell short as they lost to MOKAN, 67-55. From there, however, they won three straight before falling in the semifinals, 80-68, to Vegas Elite on Saturday night. Dylan came into Peach Jam having recently been installed by the major recruiting outlets as the consensus No. 1 player in the Class of 2024, and he more than validated that reputation. He ranked second in the EYBL division in scoring at 21.2 points per game (on 52.1 percent shooting) to go along with 5.7 rebounds and 3.3 assists. Harper did not generate the same buzz as some of the younger prospects such as Cameron Boozer, Cooper Flagg and AJ Dybantsa, whose games generated long lines of fans down the hallways prior to tip, but his games were well-attended by college coaches, particularly those from the five schools on his list of possible destinations: Auburn, Duke, Indiana, Kansas and Rutgers.

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Those coaches don’t mind that Harper isn’t flashy, because they know how effective he is. He may not be an above-the-rim finisher like his father was, but at 6-foot-4 and 180 pounds, he has excellent size for a point guard, and he knows how to use it to gain leverage on driving angles and post up smaller opponents. He is not a blur with the ball, but he deftly deploys feints, hesitations and guile to blow by defenders at will. He has a sweet lefty stroke and can get buckets whenever he wants, but he much prefers setting up his teammates. Dylan doesn’t usually hunt his shot unless it’s late in the game and his team is behind. For example, he was Team USA’s leading scorer in its final game at the U19 World Cup, with 12 of his 15 points coming in the fourth quarter of an 84-70 loss to Turkey.

“He’s not an in-your-face kind of ballplayer,” Maria concedes. “He’s not soaring in and flushing it down. What makes him good is that he’s a Swiss army knife. He sees the floor like an eagle. He knows how to get his teammates involved. He’s a very capable scorer if you need him to be, but because he has a point guard mentality, he wants his teammates to succeed, even before himself.”

Peach Jam 🍑 First Team 🥇

Dylan Harper | 2024 | NY Renaissance

🍑 21.2 PPG
🍑 5.7 RPG
🍑 3.3 APG
🍑 1.7 SPG

Full Awards ⤵️https://t.co/KrAFpuznNi @dy1anharper @NYRhoops @DBFastBreakClub 🎥 @SLAM_HS pic.twitter.com/WsENWPaju3

— The Circuit (@TheCircuit) July 9, 2023

Maria has a lot more credibility than the average basketball mom — or dad, for that matter — when it comes to breaking down her son’s game. She is a former Division I player at the University of New Orleans who has spent the last two decades coaching high-level grassroots and high school teams, both boys and girls, in New Jersey. Between his mom’s pedigree and his dad’s five NBA championship rings (three with the Bulls, two with the Lakers), Dylan has been well-schooled on playing the game and managing all that comes with it. Being ranked No. 1 presents a unique set of challenges, but as his performance at Peach Jam indicated, he is not likely to fall prey to the hype trap, much less jet lag. “It’s definitely a blessing and an honor, because it means all the hard work is paying off,” he says. “But it doesn’t stop now. The main goal is still just getting better every day. And winning.”

Maria Pizarro was 7 when she emigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines with her mother and three older sisters in 1982. Her parents were separated at the time, but they reconciled five years later, whereupon her father joined the family. Maria naturally took to sports as a young girl. Once school was over, she hit the local parks and diamonds, where her competition was mostly older boys. “Because that’s how you get better, right?” she says. “It was kind of fun beating up on old men at the parks.”

Maria focused on basketball once she got to high school, and she eventually earned a scholarship to New Orleans. She delivers her own scouting report thusly: “I was super scrappy. I defended the hell out of the ball. I created offense through defense. I wasn’t a knockdown shooter. I looked to get my teammates involved. And I just loved it so much.”

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After college, Maria followed the bouncing ball to Chicago, where a friend invited her to work local summer camps and various events operated by foundations launched by local NBA players. She met Ron Sr. in 1998 when he was playing for the Bulls. In 2000, Maria got pregnant with Ron Jr. and moved back to New Jersey, while Ron Sr. left for L.A. Maria took a job with a radio station in the programming department, then left to become a video director for urban music at Jive Records. She and Ron Sr. dated off and on for a couple of years and got married on New Year’s Eve in 2005, three months before Dylan was born. Mia came along in 2010, and two years after that Maria and Ron Sr. got divorced. “Those years were very tough for me,” Maria says. “My kids’ lives are not fairy tales, like people would assume.”

Maria originally launched Ring City as a girls’ program, but when Ron Jr. started getting serious about basketball in middle school, she made it co-ed and coached his teams. She later did the same for Dylan. “She was hard but loving,” Dylan says. “She wasn’t just tough on me, either. Everyone got a little bit of it.” In 2008, Maria accepted the girls’ varsity position at DePaul Catholic High School in Wayne, N.J., but she gave that up in 2012 because she was missing too many of Ron Jr.’s high school games.

Dylan and Ron Jr. had their battles, as all brothers do, but Ron Jr.’s path through high school, where he helped Don Bosco win two state titles, and Rutgers, where he was a four-year starter, provided Dylan with a template on how to compete and advance. They were different players — Ron was a big guard who liked to play bully ball, while Dylan was far more skilled — but they had the same quiet competitiveness. “When Dylan was 5 years old, I told people he was going to be really good,” Ron Sr. says. “He reminded me of me. I was the youngest in a family of five boys. I watched them practice, and then I tried to go out there and do the same things.”

After Ron Jr. graduated high school, Don Bosco coach Kevin Diverio asked Maria if she would come on board as an assistant coach. It had nothing to do with Dylan, who was in seventh grade and a couple years from a growth spurt. He believed she could help him win. “I knew what she could do,” Diverio says. “She’s been terrific. She really commands the respect of the kids. She’s no-nonsense, all business, but at the same time she brings a little bit of the motherly factor to the team that I certainly can’t provide.”

Dylan admits there have been times when he asked Maria to back off, but he is quite clearly his mother’s son. There’s nothing he loves more than spending hours working on his game. The day after he got his driver’s license, he asked Maria if he could drive to the Bronx to participate in a workout. “I’m like, you just got your license. I’m not sending you to the Bronx,” she says. Dylan isn’t the type to get distracted by a bawdy social life, but even if he were, he would have a hard time executing that game plan. “I’m not big on girlfriends or house parties,” Maria says. “We get up, we go to school, we have our activity, whether it’s basketball or it’s dance, we get our homework done, and that’s about it. That’s the tone that I set in the household.”

Dylan has been starting at Don Bosco since he was a freshman. His play during his junior season and on the spring recruiting circuit earned him an invitation to try out for Team USA’s U19 World Cup team. Most of the players at the training camp were going into their freshman seasons of college, putting Harper in the unfamiliar position of having to fight for a place on the roster. “I’m not gonna lie, I was stressing the whole week,” he says. Not only did he make the cut, but he led the U.S. in assists (3.0 per game, to just 0.4 turnovers) and ranked fifth in scoring at 9.3 points per game, even though he was one of only two 17-year-olds on the squad. “He just got better and better every day,” says Colorado coach Tad Boyle, who was the U.S. head coach. “He doesn’t jump out at you with his length or athleticism, but he’s a good player who can affect the game in multiple ways. Going into the sixth game, I look at the stat sheet, and he’s got 20 assists to two turnovers. So he’s a great team player. He’s also a great listener, and not a lot of young players have that skill. You can tell he’s well-raised.”

It was impressive enough that Dylan played so well at Peach Jam less than 48 hours after flying halfway across the world. Coming through as a newly marked man made it even moreso. That’s a good indication that the opinions of others, good and bad, won’t dictate how he conducts his business. “I tell him all the time, just because you’re ranked high doesn’t mean you’re going to make it in the pros,” Ron Sr. says. “I went to a small school (Miami of Ohio), and I was the eighth pick in the draft. The name of the game is grinding it out.”

In 2007, following a two-year stint as an assistant coach with the Pistons, Ron Sr. moved to New Jersey. Today, he and his fiancée live with her three children in Suffern, which is just eight miles away from Maria’s house and two miles from Don Bosco Prep. Dylan and Mia usually spend a couple of nights a week at Ron Sr.’s place, and Ron Sr. was able to make it to most of Ron Jr.’s games at Rutgers. He also attends Dylan’s games and Mia’s dance competitions. “It’s awesome to get this chance, because when I was playing I didn’t spend enough time with them,” he says.

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Yet, Ron Sr. did not go to Peach Jam, and he stays away from the bigger camps and tournaments. When he attends Dylan’s high school games, he sits quietly high in the bleachers. And when college coaches call to talk about Dylan, Ron Sr. sends them to his mom. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of him, but I don’t want this to be about me,” he says. This is Maria’s preference as well. “People ask me, why doesn’t he come? And my answer is, because it’s always been me,” Maria says. “I give him a lot of credit. He respects that. If a college coach calls him, he says, ‘Don’t call me. You gotta call her. She’s the one who calls the shots.’”

Maria’s parents also live close by in Totowa. One of her sisters owns a yoga studio, another sister teaches there, and the third is a pastry chef in Napa Valley, California. Maria is the only one of her siblings who has children, so her parents have been at all their grandkids’ events from the very beginning. Ron Sr. is not shy about reminding his son that dad’s decision to attend college 40 miles from his home town of Dayton meant his family members could come to all his college home games. “I told him, your grandma and grandpa have been driving you around since you were one day old, and you can reward them by staying close at Rutgers,” Ron Sr. says.

After returning home to New Jersey to work for a couple of days in her job as a project manager and producer for NYC Summer Hoops, Mia will fly to Las Vegas, where Ron Jr., is competing in the NBA Summer League under a two-way contract with the Toronto Raptors. Dylan will stay home to rest before finishing out the summer circuit. Then it’s time to get ready for his final year of high school. All eyes will be on Dylan as his college decision draws nigh, but he has done a good job thus far of tuning out the noise and staying on the grind. If his play is prologue, he’ll execute his next move with precision, thoughtfulness, and based on an ultimate desire to win. “I tell everybody, we’re in today. We’re on the yoga mat,” Maria says. “The accolades and the rankings definitely come with pressure, but that’s not what Dylan plays for. That’s what makes this kid unique. In my eyes, whoever gets him is going to be really lucky.”

(Top photo: Courtesy of Nike)

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