One of nation's top recruits is from Charlotte. Will he play at a local college like Dad?

When he was 16, a young man who would later become one of the Charlotte 49ers' greatest college basketball players, became a father.

Curtis Withers was a sophomore at West Charlotte, a place he describes as the high school from the movie "Lean On Me."

"Every day was a fashion show," said Withers, now playing professionally in Argentina. "People were getting their hair braided in the middle of class, gambling in class. ... It wasn't hard to get caught up in that, but all of a sudden I had a kid, I was playing basketball. I couldn't get caught up in that."

That baby has grown up to be North Mecklenburg High 6-foot-9 junior Jae'Lyn Withers, one of the nation's best high school basketball players. Withers climbed 54 spots in the latest Rivals Top 150 rankings for players in the class of 2019. He is No. 54. This week, coaches from Louisville visited campus to watch Withers play pick-up in open gym, and Withers received a scholarship offer from Providence. He also has offers from Boston College, Clemson, Florida, Georgetown and Virginia.

For Withers and other top high school stars, a very important part of the recruiting process begins this weekend. It's the first NCAA Live Evalution Period. Division I college coaches will scatter throughout the country to watch high school players in travel-ball games, particularly in tournaments hosted by adidas, Under Armour and Nike. Withers will play on the adidas Gauntlet in Washington, D.C., beginning Saturday. He will play for Team Loaded North Carolina, which produced three NBA draft picks last June (Dennis Smith, Bam Adebayo and Frank Mason).

Curtis Withers, 33, admits that having a child at such an early age made him look at life differently.

"It was one of those life lessons," Curtis Withers said. "I had gone to a (high school camp sponsored by the NBA players association) and you would hear stories about having a kid at a young age. I knew what not to do, but I wasn't as wise as I thought I was."

Dealing with having a child young

Curtis said that from the time Sheena Carr delivered Jae'Lyn, they worked as a unit to raise the best child they could.

"I think sometimes people need certain things," Curtis Withers said. "For me, it was to wake up to things I wasn't conscious of. Everything I did, I thought about my son. I didn't go out. I didn't smoke. I didn't drink. I didn't do anything. I'm like, 'If I did this and something happens, how would my son look at it?"

Withers didn't come up in a wealthy family or live in a wealthy neighborhood. He said buying wipes and diapers was a chore, but he learned to make the $20 per week he received from his mother last all week.

"I had free lunch at school," he said, "but I had to learn to budget early. Responsibility kicked in early."

At West Charlotte, Withers, a 6-8 power forward, was two-time Observer Player of the Year in Mecklenburg County. In college, he was a three-time all-conference player at Charlotte, where he's one of the school's all-time greats.

After college, he had NBA tryouts, including with the then-Charlotte Bobcats, and played in the developmental league. But with a family to raise, and bills mounting, he opted to play overseas, where the money was better. Withers is now in his 10th year of international basketball, currently playing in Argentina.

Keeping up with Jae'Lyn from afar

No matter where he is, Curtis says he keeps a close eye on Jae'Lyn, who averaged 20 points and 10.1 rebounds for the Vikings last season. He was named I-MECK conference player of the year and made the all-district team.

Not bad for a guy who didn't seriously start playing basketball until the summer after his eighth-grade year.

"I was playing football, wide receiver, tight end," Jae'Lyn Withers said. "But I was growing and I was afraid of getting hit in my knees and I kept having little injuries."

Jae'Lyn Withers spurted from a skinny 5-8 eighth grader into an even skinnier 6-2 freshman. By the end of his freshman year, he was 6-6, beginning to grow like you might expect for someone whose father is 6-8 and whose mother is 6-foot.

But growing so fast, and learning a new game, Withers was a little, well, awkward. But he could really shoot. He could regularly hit shots well past the NBA 3-point line, which is almost 24 feet from the basket.

North Mecklenburg coach Duane Lewis said he knew he had a potential gem from the first time he saw Withers at school. He just needed Withers to be patient. To his surprise, Withers didn't mind playing junior varsity his freshman year, and he didn't mind when Lewis asked him to lift weights to improve his strength and to always come to the gym to work on his game.

Said Lewis: "We were like, 'Look, you can do this.' He was the best player on the JV team. He struggled some, but it was good for him because he had never played. As a 10th grader, he expected to be the man because he was the man on JV. That's what we expected to create."

Developing into a major prospect

After a solid sophomore season and summer, Withers had a breakout junior year, putting that long distance shooting ability on full display, along with improved strength and athleticism. He shot 43 percent from 3-point range last season.

"People look at me crazy for the shots he takes from 25 or 28 feet," Lewis said, "but he makes them. He's always been able to shoot the ball. The thing was for him to get stronger. He's done that. Now, people say he should play (near the basket), but he's a wing. He's gifted out there on the perimeter. He's a great kid and he's going to play at the highest level. He's earned it. He's put the time in."

Lewis said Withers takes honors classes at school and has better than a B average.

"He's a smart kid," Lewis said. "His teachers like him. Everybody likes him. Somebody has raised him well."

Curtis Withers credits Jae'Lyn's mother for much of that and says Jae'Lyn has an incredible support system of parents, grandparents, great-grands and a large network of close friends surrounding him.

All those people have helped create a college recruit whose "stock" seems to be rising as fast as anyone in the Carolinas.

"He's one of the most intriguing prospects you'll find because at 6-9, he has the ability to shoot from long distance," said regional recruiting analyst Rick Lewis of Phenom Hoop Report. "He has as good a range as anybody in the country. But the thing I like about him most is he's such a humble young man. Very mature, very poised. He just conducts himself so well on the court and off the court, he's such a soft-spoken, well-mannered young man. He seems like the total package."

Best Viking ever?

At the end of his sophomore season, Lewis said he thought Withers could be as good as the two best Vikings to ever play at North Meck: 6-9 forward Jamie Skeen, who played with VCU in the 2011 Final Four, and 6-8 power forward DeMarco Johnson, who was a star at Charlotte and was a second-round pick by the New York Knicks in 1998 NBA draft

Perhaps he could be as good as his father, or maybe even play at the same college. They talk about it.

"Everybody asks me about that," Jae'Lyn said of potentially playing for the 49ers. "It's still a consideration. I'm open to any of the schools, to be honest, if they can provide the best situation for me as far as my development and getting to the (NBA). So if that's Charlotte, shucks, I guess I'm a 49er. It would be something I would think about."

Curtis said his son is a "homebody who doesn't want to leave the honeycomb."

"I tell him you don't have to go to Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Duke, Kentucky or Kansas to make it to the next level," Curtis Withers said. "They get the most exposure and have better opportunities for you to show your skills. But the biggest part of him picking a school is we would like for it to be geared towards his potential major. The school needs to fit the career path.

"He loves video games. I pushed him towards video game design and technology versus going to get an African-American studies degree and finishing school and now you can't do anything with it."

Whenever the father is in town, he takes his son to work out with him. Curtis calls Jae'Lyn his "sparring partner" and says Jae'Lyn is his. He's not surprised his son has developed into the player he has, and in some ways having him as early as he did helped shape both of their lives. But now, Curtis said he just wants to see how the recruitment ends.

"I was never worried about what's happening now, with the colleges," Curtis Withers said. "For the most part, he was a good kid and it's a lot easier being his height, obviously. But now it's about the ultimate goal, what he actually wants to do. I let him make his own decisions and I think he'll make the right one for him."

Wertz: 704-358-5133; Twitter: @langstonwertzjr

This story was originally published April 20, 2018 at 4:10 PM with the headline "One of nation's top recruits is from Charlotte. Will he play at a local college like Dad?."