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Can John Calipari pull Skal Labissiere out of Memphis?

Skal Labissiere, Denio Chirindja

Evangelical Christian School’s Skal Labissiere, left, blocks a shot by Lausanne Collegiate School’s Denio Chirindja (4) in the first half of the Division II Class A high school basketball championship game on Saturday, March 2, 2013, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

AP

HAMPTON, Va. -- There’s not a single recruit in the country more interesting that Skal Labissiere.

Lets start with the basics. He’s a 6-foot-9 sophomore that can run the floor and has the kind of length and athleticism that makes schools like Kentucky and Kansas very, very interested in him. Rivals currently has him ranked as the No. 6 recruit in the Class of 2015. That alone is enough to make him worth watching in each and every basketball game that he plays.

Now throw in the fact that he’s a native of Haiti whose house literally collapsed on him in the devastating earthquake that leveled the country back in 2010. As recently as last July his parents were still living in the school in which his mother was the principal.

That’s not it. Labissiere, who now lives in Mississippi just south of Memphis and plays his high school ball in the city and his AAU ball for Penny Hardaway’s team, is setting himself up to be in the middle of a recruiting battle between current Memphis head coach Josh Pastner and current Kentucky head coach John Calipari, who didn’t exactly make a lot of friends on his way out of the Tiger program.

“Memphis and Kentucky. They’re coming at me the hardest,” Labissiere said, while also mentioning Kansas and Auburn had offered him and that UCLA, Georgetown and Tennessee were showing a lot of interest.

Perhaps Coach Cal knows that he’ll have his work cut out for him pulling a player out of Memphis, because he extended an offer to Skal after seeing him play just one game, the first high school game of the season, despite the fact that Labissiere “didn’t have a great game.”

“Coach Cal told me, ‘usually we don’t offer kids that young,’” he said.

Labissiere said that he likes that Kentucky gets players to the next level, and that’s not a difficult sell when Coach Cal can claim at least two, and potentially a third, No. 1 overall picks -- Marcus Camby, Nerlens Noel and Anthony Davis -- that have the same build as Labissiere. But he also added that Pastner “is a really good guy” and that he enjoys the Memphis coaching staff and likes the way that the Tigers play.

“People talk about that a lot in Memphis, because not everybody in Memphis likes Coach Cal,” he said.

You can find Rob on twitter @RobDauster.