Cavalier Corner

December 2013

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GoalOriented Fourth-Year Joe Harris Has Shot Down His Critics T By Whitelaw Reid he ceiling and walls in Joe Harris' bedroom in his hometown of Chelan, Wash., are covered with handwritten messages. Above the bed, there is a quote from John Wooden about success, one from Jack Nicklaus about class, one from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about being a good teammate. Near the closet are goals that Harris wrote down when he was in the fourth grade: "Win a championship, be the best, prove people wrong, great attitude, leadership, class, ambition, dedication, become a pro." In his first three years at Virginia, Cavalier fans have seen Harris accomplish most of the things on his list. Coming out of high school, Harris, one of the least-heralded members of head coach Tony Bennett's inaugural six-member recruiting class, definitely had some doubters. They said he was wasn't athletic enough. They said he hadn't played against good enough competition. They said he was too one-dimensional. Suffice to say, they were wrong. Bennett, for one, was never deterred by the fact that Harris wasn't considered a can't-miss prospect coming out of high school. i17-19.Joe Harris.indd 1 "There are some [prospects] who just are so elite that your newborn child could see it, anybody could see it that they're so good," Bennett said. "After [that group], there's such a small difference. There's the five-stars and then twostars, three-stars, four-stars, there's not that much [difference]. How do you know? "Some guys just do what Akil [Mitchell] and Joe have done, and I think that's what you see with those guys. It's not how you start but how you finish. To get concerned with how many stars they have or what they're ranked, I think it's such a subjective thing. After a certain number, I don't know that it matters." 11/5/13 2:19 PM

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