Twenty hours it took for Rucker to traverse the East Coast, via train, from Atlanta. She reached Fitchburg, Mass., on Wednesday. There, she will attend Notre Dame Preparatory, a boarding school that essentially exists to field girl's and boy's basketball teams. Michael Beasley is one of the school's notable alums. He's now at Kansas State, a very temporary stop on his way to the NBA. Rucker views Notre Dame Prep as the same kind of weigh station on her path to professional hoops.

Not long after those 20 hours, the transformation already had begun. Rucker met her new teammates on Thursday and they treated her, she says, "like they knew me for years. It gave me more confidence about coming here."

Most significant, Rucker feels clear-headed. She has sworn off smoking weed. Her affinity for marijuana was what threatened to derail a potentially precedent-setting basketball career. Rucker may be the most extraordinary guard prospect to come along in a while. Yet she didn't play high-school ball last season, spending the year at an alternative school.

And that's what Fitchburg, Mass., and the 20 hours on the train with her mother are about - saving herself. Rucker has a distinctive tatoo on her right shoulder that's built around the motto, "Only God Can Judge Me." She was putting herself in situations that rendered those words with falsehood.

"I know I have the talent, but it was all going to waste," says Rucker, ranked No. 8, with a bullet, in the HoopGurlz Super Sixty for 2009. "Smoking weed is what got me in trouble. I don't have a problem saying that. Everybody has done something wrong in their lives. I've been around weed all my life. What it did was make me do things that didn't allow me to play basketball."

"But I can't dunk with two hands yet," she says. "I want to dunk in a game. I want to be able to dunk on someone."

Rucker says these things matter-of-factly, not betraying an ounce of doubt. "I want to be No. 1 in the nation, No. 1 in my state, No. 1 in my class, No. 1 in college and No. 1 in the WNBA," she says. "My number (at Notre Dame Prep) might be No. 1." Rucker also says she wants to be the first player to go straight to the WNBA out of high school, though she concedes, "They probably won't let me." If not, she likes Alabama, Georgia Tech, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio State and Tennessee as college alternatives.

No one who's actually seen Rucker play would dismiss her declarations as egomaniacal bluster. She had a spectacular Big Apple debut, competing for Exodus NYC in the Rose Classic on Saturday. During a game against New Heights, Rucker shared the JHS 113 floor with as many as six other high-major Division I prospects, three of which are nationally ranked in the 2008 class by HoopGurlz, and she appeared to be on another level altogether.

Rucker is panther-quick, has uncanny balance and body control, and explodes off the floor as if her sneakers were rocket-propelled. She consequently has incredibly high lift and release point on her shot, which she can launch seemingly any time and anywhere on the court. She also has dribble moves from another planet, with the ability to pull off feats such as crossing over on the dead sprint. Rucker also is an excellent passer and determined defender. Seconds into the game for Exodus, she side-stepped a screen as if made of elastic and pounced on her opponent's dribble like a fasting lion on fresh, morning meat. At times, she seems capable of tossing dimes to herself.

"Out of all the players I've just been around, never mind coached," says John McGraw, girl's basketball coach at Notre Dame Prep, "the only one who might have been as good at this stage was Epiphany Prince."

And Prince scored 113 points in a 2006 game for Murry Bertraum High School, a storied basketball program in lower Manhattan.

If Rucker is to do anything remotely similar this coming season, she will have to rise about the gauntlet in store for her at Notre Dame Prep. The school plays what McGraw calls a "hodge-podge schedule" that includes only three home games (equalling the number of home contests during McGraw's first two seasons, combined, in Fitchburg). A "close" game, geographically, is anything within 90 minutes of Fitchburg, McGraw says. Community and junior colleges are sprinkled in with high schools as far away as Ohio. The relentless travel is financed mostly by an NCAA evaluation tournament that McGraw operates called the Big Apple Tournament of Champions.

McGraw read about Rucker's high-school struggles on HoopGurlz.com and, after consulting coaches and scouts in the Southeast, decided to gamble his remaining scholarship money that she would be the kind of marquee star his team needed to survive its unique circumstances. For Rucker, this was no gamble; it was an imperative. She already believes this move will succeed, she says, because "I'm surrounded by good people and the gym is open 24/7."

This started as a 20-hour trip laced with uncertainty, but already Shacara Rucker knows one thing for sure.

"I'm flying back home," she says.

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