Brains & Basketball

Most of the top basketball players grow up dreaming of college offers from powerhouses like Kentucky, Duke and North Carolina.

One of those calls may still come for longtime West Meadows resident Varun Ajjarapu, but his first one won’t.

That honor goes to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT.

Regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious universities, MIT called the Ajjarapu house two weeks ago and offered the 14-year-old Varun, who everyone knows as “V”, the chance to play his college basketball in Cambridge, MA.

“Unless Varun chooses to fall off the face of the earth, we’ll be watching him,’’ his mother, Sandhya, says MIT head coach Larry Anderson told her.

The Engineers (fitting, right?) were 21-7 last year at the Division III level, but it’s not the name that typically rolls off a recruit’s lips or makes it onto recruiting websites.

But academically, the school is superior to most, which makes it attractive for V, a straight-A student who attended Chiles Elementary and Williams Middle School. And anyone who has played basketball at the New Tampa YMCA or taken part in the Wharton summer basketball camp has probably seen V in action.

He is now at Berkeley Prep, where he will be entering his sophomore year. But at a recent AAU tournament in Atlanta, he earned MVP honors, and caught the eye of MIT coaches at another basketball event at Yale.

V is a ways off from having to choose which college he will attend, but an offer from MIT at age 14 isn’t a bad way to start the recruiting process.

“Too good to be true,” Sandhya said.