Orange County Sports : Highly Recruited Cherokee Parks to Begin College Trips : Prep basketball: Marina’s 6-foot-11 senior center has narrowed his choices to Arizona, Arizona State, Duke, Kentucky and UCLA.

HUNTINGTON BEACH —  Five shoe boxes sit under Cherokee Parks’ bed, but they don’t house the Marina High School center’s size 14 basketball shoes.

Parks uses the boxes to file the hundreds of recruiting letters he receives every year.

He recently has added a file cabinet to keep the hundreds of recruiting letters from schools including Duke, Arizona, Arizona State, Kentucky, UCLA, Indiana, Michigan, Syracuse, North Carolina, North Carolina State and Florida State.

“I couldn’t even begin to count the number of letters I have,” Parks said. “There’s a ton of them.”

Parks received his first recruiting letter in the eighth grade. He had been playing basketball only a few months when the letter came from Stanford Coach Mike Montgomery.

Perhaps Montgomery was the first to see the potential. Perhaps he was getting an early start on a gangly 14-year-old who, at the time, hated playing basketball.

Maybe Montgomery just wanted a head start on Parks, now one of the most sought-after high school basketball players in the nation.

Last season, Parks averaged 22.1 points, 13.4 rebounds and 3.5 blocked shots and shot 59% from the field.

A three-year starter, he has averaged more than 20 points and 10 rebounds per game since his sophomore year.

Marina Coach Steve Popovich said Parks could be the most highly recruited basketball player in Orange County history.

“(Mater Dei’s) Tom Lewis and LeRon Ellis were highly recruited,” Popovich said. “But Cherokee keeps getting mentioned in the top four or five nationally.”

That allows Parks to be picky.

He narrowed his choices to five schools--Arizona, Arizona State, Duke, Kentucky and UCLA. Their combined record last season was 105-57, with Duke, Arizona and UCLA reaching the NCAA tournament.

Parks based his decision on the quality and needs of each program, his impressions of the coaching staffs and the players.

“Mainly it came down to the coaches and the players they’re recruiting,” Parks said. “Location was kind of a factor, but it wasn’t the main reason.”

Each of the five finalists have told Parks, a center, that he will move to power forward if he comes to their school.

” . . . at least until I get a little bulk on me,” said Parks, who would like to add 12 pounds to his playing weight of 228 pounds. “I still want to keep my body fat (percentage) low.”

Because his final five choices are located all over the nation, Parks said he will make his decision after visiting the campuses. He said he hasn’t decided yet if he’ll commit to a college before the high school season begins.

So in the next two months, Parks will be rolling up more frequent flier miles than the Cal State Fullerton football team. The airlines are going to love the kid.

So, without further ado, Mr. Parks, here is your itinerary:

Oct. 14-16, Lexington, Ky.: Parks will jump off the plane just in time to catch the Wildcats’ Midnight Madness practice to kick off the 1990-91 season.

The Wildcats were one of the first teams to schedule a midnight scrimmage, and the school goes all out--cheerleaders, the band, the works.

“That’s going to be something else,” Parks said.

But the highlight of the trip will be meeting with Wildcat Coach Rick Pitino, who visited Parks in Huntington Beach two weeks ago.

“Pitino coached Providence and with the Knicks and he turned both teams around,” Parks said. “After coaching in the NBA, he knows what it takes to get there.”

Kentucky is currently finishing the last year of an NCAA probation, the result of infractions during the recruitment of former Los Angeles Fairfax star Chris Mills.

Oct. 19-21, Durham, N.C.: Duke’s record under Coach Mike Krzyzewski--four Final Four appearances in the last five years and 231-101 in the last 10 seasons--appeals to Parks. But he knows little about Durham, and is curious about the Atlantic Coast Conference campus.

“I don’t know about living in a different part of the country,” Parks said. “That’s why I want to take the trips.”

Parks will attend basketball practices and a football game and will stay with the Blue Devil players.

Oct. 26-28, Tempe, Ariz.: Parks has seen this campus before, having watched the Pac-10 basketball tournament in Tempe last year. During his recruiting trip he’ll watch the USC-Arizona State football game, sit in during classes and watch practice.

And, of course, he’ll meet with Sun Devil Coach Bill Frieder.

Frieder made quite an impression on Parks and his mother, Debe, when he visited their home in early September.

“Basketball is that guy’s life,” Parks said. “He’s fanatical.”

“When he came in, he was dressed all nice and neat,” Parks said. “Then we started talking basketball with him. He starts running his hands through his hair and by the time he left, he was a mess.”

Nov. 2-4, Tucson, Ariz: A week after his trip to Tempe, Parks will return to another Arizona campus.

Parks was in eighth grade when he first met Wildcat Coach Lute Olson.

“He came to watch (former Marina star) Mark Georgeson in a game,” Parks said. “I didn’t even know who Olson was. That shows you what little I knew about basketball.”

It turns out that Parks was one of the few people around Marina who didn’t know of Olson, who coached the Vikings from 1965 to 1969.

Nov. 16-18, Westwood: No need for a plane ticket here. Westwood’s just a 30-minute ride up the 405 freeway from Parks’ home.

Parks is a regular at UCLA basketball games and several of his friends and Marina graduates go to school there.

“It’s a nice, big school,” Parks said. “I want to go to a big school.”

Many people in the recruiting circle say UCLA has a lock on Parks. But Parks says that’s not necessarily so.

The Bruins have a talented core of young players--Tracy Murray, Don MacLean and freshmen Shon Tarver and Ed O’Bannon. Tyus Edney of Long Beach Poly, one of the top point guard recruits in Southern California, orally committed to UCLA last week.

“(Coach Jim) Harrick’s building an awesome program there,” Parks said. “UCLA will be good if I decide to sign late. I can see how the team does this year.”

In the meantime, everyone wants to know what Parks is doing. Rarely does a night go by that his phone isn’t ringing off the hook with calls from reporters, coaches and recruiters.

Reporters from as far away as Chicago, Raleigh, N.C., and Philadelphia regularly call local papers, asking about Parks. One magazine writer even interviewed the Marina equipment manager about Parks’ college choices, Popovich said.

“I think it’s the uniqueness of his name,” Popovich said. “With a name like that, people automatically latch onto it. I think it (his popularity) would be different if his name was John Jones or something.”

Everyone already knows Parks has one of the greatest name s in basketball. But he wants to show he has the greatest all-round game .

College coaches all over the nation have watched Parks play the last three summers at the Nike Camp in Princeton, N.J. Parks has gone against some of the best players in the country, including Shawn Bradley, a 7-4 center now at Brigham Young.

“I love going there because you can go all out,” Parks said. “The officials working our games are trying out for jobs in the ACC and the Big East, and they allow you to be aggressive.

“You learn a lot at those camps. You find out that the turnaround (jump shot) doesn’t work against the bigger guys. It gets sprayed back in your face.”

Said Popovich: “The camp has helped Cherokee exposure-wise, but I don’t know how much basketball-wise. A guy can be a great player in his own community, but a camp like that will let him see how he stacks up nationally.”

This summer, Parks found out how he stacks up internationally. He averaged 39 points and 18 rebounds per game for a Southern California all-star team that played in Stockholm, Sweden.

Parks said the games in Sweden gave him a taste of what to expect in college.

“There are a lot of 6-8 guys and the European style is very aggressive,” he said. “Over the back is unknown there.”