Devon Bookert was a star that no Division I coaches took the time to see.

During his sophomore year at West Anchorage (Alaska) High School, he led his team to a state championship win and then scored 38 points in a state title loss the following season.

For his senior year, Bookert was named the Gatorade Alaska Boys Player of the Year. In one game, he finished with 33 points, 11 rebounds, 10 assists and eight steals — just two steals away from a quadruple-double.

Constantly he led his team in scoring and rarely did he ever leave the game. But despite all of his high school success, he didn’t receive any D-I offers.

“Schools would always send me letters and stuff but no one would offer me a scholarship,” Bookert said. “ … Unless you’re like the No. 1 player in the country, they’re not going to come all the way up to Alaska and risk you not coming to their school.”

Bookert had to spend the summer after high school playing with an AAU team in California to earn any attention. But after playing a year at a preparatory school in Nevada, he joined Florida State’s squad to fulfill his dreams of playing D-I basketball.

Now a junior, the guard leads the team in 3-pointers (21) and shooting percentage from beyond the arc (42 percent), despite being out for about a month with a foot injury. When the Seminoles (9-6, 1-1 Atlantic Coast) travel to the Carrier Dome to take on Syracuse (11-4, 2-0) at 8 p.m. Sunday, Bookert will need just three baskets from 3-point land to become the 20th player in FSU history to make 100 career 3s.

“He doesn’t get rattled and he’s a knock-down shooter,” junior guard Montay Brandon said. “ … He’s one of the leaders on our team. Everybody listens to him.”

Summers in Alaska bring around 22 hours of sunlight a day and for Bookert, that meant plenty of time to play sports outside as a kid. The more tired he was, the easier it was to go to sleep, even though it was still light out.

By the time he was in middle school, Bookert already had his heart set on playing D-I basketball. In high school, Bookert woke up at 5 a.m. every day to shoot about 250 shots and work out before school.

His work paid off, but even though he was well known in Alaska, his basketball talents were mostly unknown to those in the continental United States.

By the end of Bookert’s senior year, the D-I offers he was waiting for still never came and he considered giving up his dream and playing at an in-state D-II school.

Instead, Bookert enrolled in Impact Basketball Academy in Las Vegas for the fall of 2011. He was familiar with it because of a week spent there during a trip his Alaskan AAU team took in 2009 to boost its players’ exposure.

Enrolling in the prep school allowed Bookert to join Branch West, an AAU team and recruiting service, for the summer. At the Las Vegas Fab 48 in late July of 2011, Bookert shined and led his team to an upset of one of the top teams in the country.

Finally, the D-I schools noticed and scholarship offers poured in.

“Obviously when you’re watching AAU ball some guys just kind of stand out,” FSU head coach Leonard Hamilton said. “ … I thought that he just displayed a high basketball IQ that I found somewhat appealing and obviously he’s a very good shooter and everybody needs shooters.”

But because it was late in the summer, Bookert would have been months behind in training with a team. He committed to Florida State and attended the prep school for a year, where basketball became an even more prominent aspect of his life.

“It helped me to work on my game and helped me mature a little bit more before college,” Bookert said.

Now, Bookert is more than 4,000 miles and almost four years removed from his dominant rein in high school.

His head coach often jokes about him riding a moose or living in an igloo.

Bookert still prefers the Alaskan cold to the humidity in Florida and he and teammate Michael Ojo, a native of Nigeria, have free-throw shooting contests and play FIFA to determine who controls the thermostat in the room they share.

And though he nearly didn’t make it to D-I basketball, Bookert has a chance at Seminoles history on Sunday.

Said Bookert: “Hopefully I can close in on that, but nothing is ever for sure.”

Published on January 10, 2015 at 9:03 pm

Contact Jon: [email protected] | @jmettus