Purdue freshmen are products of their high school environments

When the fall semester begins, Purdue's three freshmen — Eric Hunter, Emmanuel Dowuona and Trevion Williams — will be three of about 42,000 students on the West Lafayette campus.

It'll be a stark contrast from their backgrounds prior, a common denominator among the three newcomers being this: Each are products of small, non-traditional high schools.

For Hunter, it was Charles A. Tindley Accelerated School in Indianapolis, where he was one of 287 students roaming the halls — in full uniform, by the way — before graduating in May alongside just 54 other seniors.

For Williams, he was one of just 850 or so, total, at Henry Ford Academy's School for Creative Studies, an art- and design-focused 6-through-12 school located in Downtown Detroit.

And for Dowuona, the big man graduated from Miami's Westwood Christian Academy as part of a class of maybe 50 kids.

For all three, their experiences and backgrounds have been different, but their commonality has lied in that they've always stood out at their schools, in more ways than one.

Eric Hunter was asked whether he was the first Division I basketball player to come out of Tindley.

He laughed.

“I think I was the first for a lot of stuff," he joked.

It got to Hunter early on in his prep career, not playing premier competition at the 1A school in Indianapolis, being at risk of being overlooked, as they say.

But he'd come up through the Tindley middle school program and when given chances to leave, the Pike district resident opted on his own accord to remain at the particularly demanding school, where hallway conduct is as closely enforced as the dress code, freshmen are in geometry after putting algebra behind them in middle school and school runs from 8 a.m. past 4 p.m. every day.

It's a demanding academic climate, but one that likely prepared Hunter well for college. Basically, every class he took in high school was an honors-level or accelerated course.

“By the time these students finish their sophomore year," Tindley athletic director Marcel Bonds said at Hunter's signing day event in November, "they’ve already achieved what would be equivalent to their high school diploma, in terms of credits."

That academic climate hasn't just prepared Hunter well for college, but it's taken a whole bunch of it off his plate.

Hunter enrolled at Purdue with an inordinate amount of college credit already to his name — just how much is to be determined still — and that was before his graduation from Tindley lined up to where he was able to enroll in Maymester, perhaps a first at Purdue for an incoming freshman.

The guard left Tindley having led the school to a state title as a junior, among countless other résumé lines earned during his four years at the school on the northeast side of Indy.

At the end of his four years, Hunter had earned all the honors and recruiting attention he might have feared early in his prep career he wouldn't due to his school's modest sports profile. He made history at his school, and he did so as the proverbial big fish in a small pond.

And, he says, the small-school stigma, if you'd call it that, drove him.

“I think the biggest impact it has is it puts a huge chip on your shoulder," Hunter said, "because you feel like there’s big-school biases and people don’t take you seriously, like, ‘You can’t do that against a big school.’"

For Dowuona, Westwood Christian wasn't just his basketball platform in the U.S. after he moved from his native Ghana.

It was his transition team to a new country, the small, Baptist school in Miami being his landing spot after he came over.

"There's an emphasis on sports," Westwood basketball coach Jose Amat said, "but nowhere near the emphasis that's put on the spirituality part, and that makes it a small school. Nowadays, you don't see that too often."

The modest student population probably was of benefit to Dowuona upon his introduction to a new country. Ghana's an English-speaking country, so the language barrier wasn't as daunting as it might have been otherwise, but dialects shift as oceans are crossed, so it was still a transition, for sure. And that says nothing of the move from one country's education system to another's.

"He came in as a very humble, focused and mature individual," Amat said, "and he came into an environment where the teachers have a one-on-one relationship with the students, and he fit in perfectly, a perfect fit for us.

"I think a big school might have been bad for him in that situation. Not that it would have distracted him, but there would have just been so many different things going on at once."

Dowuona stood out at Westwood in more ways than one, physically dominating against small-school competition on the floor and standing probably a good foot over most of his classmates in the hallways, at least until the night he had to get down on one knee to be crowned the school's Homecoming king.

"He became the face of our school, quite honestly," Amat said.

Especially on the court, where Dowuona, again, dominated physically against the other tiny schools Westwood played against, at least until his high school career ended midseason this year due to an eligibility matter stemming from his move from Ghana.

But as with Hunter and Williams, level-of-competition concerns that might come with small-school backgrounds are offset by players' performances against top-shelf summer competition.

"I think all three of us have proven we can do exactly what we’ve done at any level," Hunter said.

Williams' story has been well-documented, how the Chicago native left his home city to escape the violence that claimed the life of his uncle.

His landing spot: Detroit's Henry Ford Academy for Creative Studies — "a typical high school," as Williams called it, but one with an emphasis on art and design.

"I’m not an artist at all," Williams joked. "I could draw the basics but the work I did there, I can say I developed a lot. The teachers made me start to like art a little bit. I didn’t know anything about it. But I can definitely say that (Ford Academy) in terms of art, is really good. It was a great experience. I’ve got a couple art pieces that I’m hoping to hang in my room in my dorm."

At Ford, Williams said he took classes in which he and classmates designed clothing and footwear.

Now, he's preparing to don a Purdue uniform and its accompanying Nikes, doing so as the first D-I player to come from Ford, a distinction he says he'll carry with him during his college career.

"I’ve got a lot on my shoulders right now," Williams said prior to enrolling at Purdue earlier this month. "Everyone’s been getting back to me, sending me text messages, calling me saying, 'Tre, congrats, can’t wait to see you at Purdue.'

"There are a lot of people rooting for me right now. I've got to make sure to stay on top of everything and take care of my business."

That's a common theme for all three Purdue freshmen who, if nothing else, learned at their small high schools about visibility.

“My principal would always tell me it was a magnifying glass on me," Hunter said, "and for a good reason.”

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