Mr. Basketball in Minnesota could sign with WVU today — and perhaps as soon as today — and obtain a scholarship and give the Mountaineers a 6-foot-10 body to fill the remaining vacancy.

Noreen is a pretty interesting player: state records for career points and rebounds and nearly assists, too; six years on varsity; 13 inches taller today then he was six years ago. And, of course, he’d previously signed a NLI at Boston College.

Then the Eagles fired Al Skinner and Noreen was granted a release from his signed letter, though with conditions.

“It’s been wild,” Sherman said. “We’ve had calls from North Carolina, UCLA, Texas, Oklahoma and Indiana. Indiana and Texas were both up visiting after Kevin (was released).”

Sherman said Noreen wanted to play in the Big East or the ACC “because that’s been the proving ground for good players,” but he had to leave the ACC behind after discovering how difficult it might be to get a waiver  to stay within the conference.

“His talk with North Carolina was encouraging, but it was brief,” Sherman said. “He just decided he didn’t want to wait around all summer for a decision. And when you get a call from a school like West Virginia, you have to pay attention.”

Noreen also attends Minnesota Transitions School, a charter school that’s part of a strip mall and sits next to a Target and across from a Club Foods. Charter schools are sometimes shady and get a lot of attention from the NCAA with a few being deemed diploma factories.

MTS hasn’t had that attention, but was in March named one of 12 charter schools in Minnesota that needed to be restrusctured or closed. That’s the result of President Obama’s approach to schooling and MTS was seen as one of the “chronically underperforming public schools.”

That can happen with charter schools. MTS is, by basketball coach John Sherman’s description, “a public school option. We have no tuition or anything like that. Anybody in Minneapolis can attend.”

Noreen, though, is a 4.0 student who had a 36 on is ACT. He’s not chronically underperforming in the classroom. Or on the court. He had a bevvy of 40- and 50-point games, but, again, it calls MTS into the spotlight. It’s in the big city and yet is a Class 1A school because of low enrollment. MTS averaged better than 100 points per game in Noreen’s varsity career, which is outlandish in high school.

It caused all sorts of an uproar over the years and the validity of scores and statistics against Class 1A competition was scrutinized and nearly dismissed. This makes Sherman a frequent protector of MTS’s profile.

MJM: Tell me about the controversy that’s been in the new lately with scoring records being broken currently and in the past. There has been a lot of press. Give me your perspective please.

JS: First of all I will say, and I think I can be confident saying this, 90% of our critics have never seen even one MTS basketball game. They may have seen us once at the State Tournaments. Some other critics may have seen us one time and have formed their opinion in most case without even seeing us play.

I would like to invite anyone interested in our program to come down to our gym and watch what we’ve actually doing.

I think there is a wide gap between what is and what people think we are doing down there.

The biggest gap might be in talking about our records. For instance, Kevin Noreen’s State score record of 3534 points for his career and a lot of people think he has achieved this by being part of a team that presses the whole game.

They think he plays 36 minutes a game even when we are ahead by 80 points. Just the other day he came out of a game with 15 minutes left in the game. The game before that he came to the bench with 14 minutes left in the game. Granted he had a lot of points when he came out but I think the people who are negative about the record have a real misconception about his playing time and also the number of shots he takes.

He is a play who is capable of getting 40 points on 20 shots or even less than 20 shots. That of course includes some free throws but he is not just out there shooting every time he catches the ball. He is also among the State assist leaders right now and just plays a good solid team game all around.

As far as our team scoring records, we fast, fast, fast basketball and the scores were a lot lower in the days of the center jump. I think some of the people who have criticized our team would love to see the center jump come back too. The reality is that basketball is changing, it is getting more athletic and hopefully when you look out on the courts ten years from now, everybody is going to be playing the way that we’ve playing right now.

I think we might be a few years ahead of the time on how we play and how we move the ball. How we pass and how we get everybody involved in a very high pace on offence and I just think that is going to be the future of basketball.

I think we are going to move out of this era of flex offenses and 2-3 zone defenses sometime in the very near future.