Editor’s note: The following is part two of a three-part series looking at the life of Ames High School basketball star and future North Carolina Tar Heel Harrison Barnes.

At the beginning of the 2006-2007 basketball season for the Ames High School boys’ basketball team, coach Vance Downs was running drills with the guards when assistant coach Cary Justman came over.

“Hey, you’ve got to come look at this,” Justman said.

When Downs followed him to the other end of the court, the only freshman on the team was waiting. The assistant coach threw Harrison Barnes a bounce pass. Barnes caught the pass, turned and threw down a rim-rattling dunk.

“He about tore that basket down,” Downs said. “I had to look away, because there was no way I could allow a 14-year-old to see that expression on my face.”

The 6-foot-8-inch forward has been eliciting similar reactions ever since.

Barnes, now a senior at Ames High School, has used that athleticism and power to become the top-rated high school prospect in the country.

Every major college program in the country recruited him before he chose North Carolina last month.

Although blessed with size and a rich talent, Barnes tunes those gifts with hard work and discipline.

“[His work ethic] is just second to none,” Downs said. “I can’t say anything better than that. I’ve never seen anybody work like that … It’s really very unique.”

The coach also said he would open up the Ames High gym at 5:45 a.m. “three or four times a week” during the offseason so Barnes could get more workout time.

“I mean, who does that at that age?” Downs said. “But he does it, and he does it religiously. Then he has his school day, and then he has his workouts after school and then he has his study time. He plans it, and he works it, and then he has a long-term plan. It’s amazing stuff to witness.”

In addition to his disciplined workout schedule, Barnes is fiercely competitive, and that helped him climb to the top of most 2010 college prospect lists.

“At times, people kind of overlook it because he is so appropriate with the press and he is such a gentleman,” Downs said. “He’d cheat his own grandmother to win a game. When it’s time to play, he competes.”

Second-ranked Urbandale found that out in Barnes’ freshman season when he scored 16 points in overtime to help upset the Jayhawks.

“As a freshman that was a big deal because, going against the No. 2 team in the state when nobody expects us to be good — that was unheard of,” Barnes said. “So that kind of put me out there, put my name out there, put our team out there.”

His sophomore season, Barnes helped lead the Little Cyclones to the sub-state championship game, where they lost to rival Marshalltown on a last-second shot in overtime.

Downs instructed the players to take a couple days off, but Barnes decided to get right back to work. The following day, even before he learned that he was named to the All-State team, Barnes was back in the gym, working to make sure his team did not lose again.

It was after that sophomore season that Barnes’ stock began to rise on a national scale.

The summer after Barnes’ sophomore season, he attended the Nike Hoop Jamboree, an opportunity for the best high school basketball players in the country to compete against one another.

Barnes dominated.

“That summer, I went from nobody knowing who I was to the fourth-ranked player in the country,” Barnes said.

With Barnes’ emergence on the national basketball scene came a flood of attention from college coaches, fans and the media.

“Things really lit up for him the summer after his sophomore year, and I just remember the phone calls starting to come in,” Downs said.

Barnes received scholarship offers from Iowa State, Illinois State and Iowa before the Jamboree. In the three days after the event, he received offers from 17 other schools.

The sudden flood of attention caught Barnes off-guard.

“It was jaw dropping,” he said. “When you first start getting into it, it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m getting this letter from Tennessee; I’m getting this letter from Louisville, Coach [Rick] Pitino is calling me.’ But, after a while, you just become used to it. You just have to take everything in stride.”

But even as Barnes got used to the recruiting process, he never stopped having fun with it. Last February, Barnes and his family wanted to go see the Duke-North Carolina game in Durham, N.C. He was strongly considering both schools and wanted to see them play, but he also had another motive for going to the game.

“Someone had told us that Coach K [Duke men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski] had never been surprised before, so we wanted to surprise him and be the first people to ever surprise him about anything,” Barnes said. “He knows exactly what is going on. He has been at Duke for 30 years, so he knows how everything works, and we were able to sneak in there without him knowing.”

Downs was particularly impressed with how Barnes handled all the recruiting and the attention.

“What has shocked me is, throughout the process, with all the media put on him and all the attention put on him, his mindset really hasn’t changed,” Downs said.

“We had an assistant that was here last year from a big-time university. He had stayed from the game the previous night and was in school the next day, and he made the comment about [Harrison’s] percentage or something that could have been better, and Harrison made the comment, ‘Hey, it’s win number three. That’s all we care about, getting the next win.’ And that has really been his mindset throughout the whole deal.”

Barnes never let the recruiting get in the way of his team, as he led the Little Cyclones to an undefeated state championship his junior season. But that state championship did not satiate his desire to win. Even with college looming, his focus is squarely on the team he is with, the Little Cyclones.

“My only goal right now is to win another state championship,” Barnes said.

He backed that up with an impressive 31-point performance en route to a sound 78–42 victory over Urbandale to begin his final high school season.

But with college on the horizon, Barnes is preparing to live up to his long-term goal of living like a true Christian. He hopes to follow in the footsteps of role models like Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner and hall-of-fame basketball player David Robinson.

“I would hope that I can get to the level that those guys have achieved, not only athletically, but spiritually as well,” Barnes said.