In a small world, Berkmar guard stands tall

He walks onto the court, a shrub among trees.

It's hard enough for any freshman to stroll directly into the starting lineup for his varsity basketball team, but Berkmar's Wilson Murray isn't your typical 16-year-old who's playing with the big boys.

"Big" is certainly right, too.

Murray is 5 foot 3, a height rarely encountered on any level of basketball past middle school. But here he is, presumably the shortest starting player in metro Atlanta, awaiting the tip-off at center court. The two players nearest him are nearly a full foot taller.

It's a small world.

Murray remembers when he was tall. He said he was 5-3 by sixth grade, which kept him right on pace with his fellow classmates. But the wonder years haven't been so kind. He hasn't grown an inch since he was 13, leaving much time for looking up at his still-growing teammates and hoping.

In the basketball world, Murray is easy to dismiss on sight alone, but that quickly changes on the floor. Teammate Yonel Brown, who also played with Murray during middle school, said he wasn't expecting much from the diminutive freshman when he showed up for tryouts earlier this year.

He quickly became convinced, though, that Murray can handle himself at the high school level.

"I kind of thought that [he was too short] coming out of middle school," Brown said. "But when he started practicing with us, I saw that he had been working on his game over the summer. He's gotten better at it."

Murray isn't a threat to dunk, much less post up on the inside, so he makes his game work in other areas.

On offense, it's all about ball security and making the defense think. He knows where he fits in Berkmar's scheme.

"I just have to control the ball better and work together with my team. I'm a ball-handler and disher," Murray said. "You have to keep guys guessing."

And he does that, piling up the assists, letting the offense rotate through him, then putting up the occasional shot when he sees an opening.

He doesn't force the action but tries to work within the flow of the team. That is reflective of the basketball intelligence coach Greg Phillips saw when he watched Murray play during the summer. The performance made him want to put Murray in his starting lineup, despite the height and youth.

"We knew he had the potential to be an unbelievably great player for us," Phillips said. "He's got a very high basketball I.Q. He knows the game and understands what we're trying to do. We're young all over the board this year, so we might as well start him now, let him learn and build for the future."

While Murray might not be swatting opponents' shots into the fourth row, one place his height hasn't hurt is on defense, where he makes life difficult on opposing guards. Big guards don't like little guards riding their kneecaps.

That may be his best on-court attribute. If he's going to have a difficult time putting up a shot on the offensive end, he's going to make sure the player he's guarding has his hands full.

"He likes playing defense and that's what we want," Phillips said. "We know there's going to be some mistakes. We know there's going to be some mismatches on film. We hope that the pressure he puts up top will negate that and give us a little bit of an advantage that we lose with his height."

But what about gaining height? Could Murray's life change? Is there a growth spurt out there?

According to a 2004 study co-authored by Emory University anthropologist Michelle Lampel, humans experience punctuated, not gradual, growth that can potentially occur for roughly the first 18 years of a person's life.

Translation: There's still time.

But whether he hits that spurt or not, Murray has accomplished a very big thing. He is in the starting lineup at the varsity level in the highest classification (AAAAA) in one of the nation's most competitive areas for high school basketball.