Bryce Thompson is a third-generation scorer who has the attention of UNC, Kansas and others

Before he was one of the best scoring guards in the Class of 2020, Bryce Thompson was a fifth-grade foreign exchange student in France.

The Thompsons enrolled Bryce in Eisenhower International School in Tulsa, Okla., when he started grade school, and every student was expected to learn a second language. Bryce picked French, so when given the option to live for a month in Amiens, France, Bryce said “au revoir” to Oklahoma and moved in with the Orlandos, who had three boys (Mica, Guilhem, and Romain). Because the exchange program required full immersion in the language and the culture, Bryce was allowed to Skype with his family only once a week.

The Orlandos walked everywhere, he remembers, including a trip to the cathedral of Notre Dame. Bryce found the three boys weren’t all that much different from him. They played video games, which has helped him stay connected all these years later — they still play NBA 2K and Call of Duty, headsets bridging the nearly 4,700-mile gap. They played sports, and he impressed kids in pickup basketball games at the park. “They thought I was like God,” he says. “At that age, I was pretty good. But compared to them, they play a lot of soccer, so for the kids that played basketball, I seemed really good.”

But when Bryce flew home to Tulsa, he realized his game had slipped a bit. Too many baguettes and not as much court time left him rusty and a little out of shape. He told his dad he wanted to get in some extra training in the morning to play catch-up. Rod Thompson, who was an All-WAC point guard at Tulsa, gave his son the bug at an early age. After Rod finished his playing career, which included professional ball in Slovenia and stints with the Rochester Skeeters and the Rapid City Thrillers in the IBA, he started training players in Tulsa in 1999. Eventually, his players persuaded him to start a team, so he formed Oklahoma PWP. Bryce used to follow his dad on the road and looked up to older players in the program, including Keiton Page and Shake Milton.

Rod agreed he’d give Bryce some extra early-morning training sessions, but with one stipulation: “If you set your alarm and you wake me up, then we’ll go. But I’m not waking you up.”

Every morning, Bryce set his alarm for 5 o’clock. He’d grab a quick breakfast and stir Rod out of bed, and they’d arrive at First United Methodist gym around 5:20 a.m.

Not long after, he started experiencing pain in his knees. X-rays showed he had Osgood Schlatter, a disease that typically occurs during growth spurts, and his growth plates were wide open. “He was thrilled about the pain,” his mom, Goldie, says, “because he associated it with his body growing and him becoming as tall as he wants to be.”

He took ice baths and constantly iced his knees, but he kept getting up, and the workouts helped turn Bryce, who now stands 6-foot-5, into a deadeye spot-up shooter.

As for dad …

“Rod is a night owl, so he would have only got a few hours of sleep by the time Bryce was coming in to wake him up,” Goldie says, laughing.

That’s when she would provide the transportation.

“We were looking forward to him getting his license more than he was,” Goldie says, “so we didn’t have to drive him any longer.”

The Thompsons knew their son had a chance to be pretty good at basketball. For one, genes were on his side. Goldie, who is 5-10, played volleyball for four years at Tulsa. She got her name because she was born in 1976 when her father, Marshall Rogers, was a rookie guard for the Golden State Warriors. Rogers led the NCAA in scoring the year before, averaging 36.8 points per game at Pan American for legendary coach Abe Lemons.

Rogers started his career at Kansas, where he averaged 24.3 points on the freshman team. As a sophomore, he averaged 7.7 points playing for Ted Owens, but he transferred at the end of that season. Owens, who now lives in Tulsa, doesn’t remember all the details, but he helped connect Rogers with Lemons, who he knew from when both were coaching college basketball in Oklahoma.

“They wanted him to play all kinds of defense,” Lemons told Sports Illustrated in 1975 of Rogers’ departure from Kansas. “Said they wanted him to take that big man’s charge. ‘Don’t worry,’ they told him, ‘if you get hurt, we’ve got somebody to put in for you.’ ”

Lemons, known for his humor and fast-paced offense, just let Rogers score, and he got enough buckets to entice the Warriors to select him 34th, in the second round of the 1976 NBA Draft. He left the Warriors after his rookie season, frustrated he was coming off the bench.

“(He wasn’t) understanding that things take time, and give it time to develop,” Goldie says. “I’m not sure he had anyone in his ear saying anything like that.”

After years in the spotlight, life after basketball was a difficult transition. He soon got divorced, and Goldie and her sister moved with their mom to Little Rock, Ark. Rogers moved back home to St. Louis, and Goldie describes their relationship as “distant.”

They would spend the summers in St. Louis staying with their grandmother, and Rogers would come by to take them to family get-togethers or to the park. “Whenever we’d go to the park, people would recognize him,” Goldie remembers. “He had his old newspaper clippings, and he’d pore over those articles about his heyday.”

Rogers died in 2011 at the age of 57, his final years spent in a nursing home after infections from diabetes forced doctors to amputate both of his legs below the knees. Goldie took Bryce to visit him several times. He never really had a relationship with his grandfather, but the scoring gene was passed along.

Bryce has taken off in the last year, elevating from one of the best players in Oklahoma to one of the best scorers in his class. He’s averaging 25.3 points per game on the Under Armour circuit, 5.8 points ahead of the No. 2 scorer, Jalen Suggs, and is the No. 61 player in the country in 2020, according to the 247Sports Composite.

During the years he was dealing with Osgood Schlatter, he wasn’t overly quick and was mostly a spot-up shooter. But now that he’s developing some burst in his legs and his upper body is filling out, his jumper is no longer what sets him apart. Bryce is more slasher than shooter.

The shot is still a strength — he has made 44 percent of his 3s on the UA circuit — but he has turned into a scorer who can get buckets at all three levels. Unlike most players his age, he understands how to set himself up off the ball. It’s almost comical to watch Bryce score again and again off of designed backdoor cuts. “Easy money,” he says, smiling.

With the ball in his hands, he slithers. Forgive the hyperbole, but it’s reminiscent of watching a younger Dwyane Wade in the way Bryce slices through a defense and then finishes with either hand. He broke his right hand before this high school season, which forced him to improve his left. “I feel like it was destiny,” he says. “It was something I needed to work on.”

Bryce’s favorite player is Kobe Bryant, and he has studied his moves and footwork, which is evident in his post work. Sam Duren, a freelance videographer in Tulsa, follows PWP and has spliced some of Bryce’s post work with Bryant’s to show the former emulating his hero.

This is where those hours in the gym have paid off. Three years ago, some of Rod’s PWP partners purchased a gym called The Ranch and gave Bryce a key. When he turned 16 and was able to drive, he kept up his morning tradition. He estimates he spends 3½ to four hours a day at The Ranch and sometimes opts for late-night routines instead of his early-morning tradition. Eventually, Goldie had to set a basketball curfew. It’s 10 p.m.

“He gets out there and forgets about time, and during the school week he needs to be home at a certain hour,” Goldie says. “Sometimes Rod is with him, and he thinks it’s OK because Dad is with me. Normally that would be OK, but I don’t care. Your body needs rest.”

Last week, Bryce got a scholarship offer from North Carolina. This week it was Tennessee. Kansas was the first major-conference program to offer, in April 2018.

Bryce hasn’t made a list and doesn’t have any favorites right now, but he does have intel on those two blue bloods. Rod played two seasons at Tulsa for Steve Robinson, the longtime assistant under Roy Williams, and then he was the leading scorer his senior season while playing for Bill Self.

“I always say that everything is about fit,” Rod says. “Who is on the roster, where you fit. I’ve been around Coach Self. You look at the last two guards. One (Frank Mason) signed with Towson. The other (Devonte’ Graham) signed with Appalachian State. Coach Self does a good job of taking those guys like that and making them better. That is the advantage I have because I really know him, and we can be straight up transparent and honest. Just like with Steve Robinson and North Carolina.”

Bryce has one luxury that his grandfather did not have: someone guiding him through the process and giving him perspective. “(My dad) was just used to being the man in St. Louis in high school,” Goldie says. “He was a track star, a basketball star. They were still talking about him when we’d go to the park and they’d still recognize him. I’m just not sure he had the people around him to keep him grounded and make sure he was focusing on the right things, make sure that he had the right priorities and just treating people right and using his platform in the right way.”

When Bryce is given the scenario that has him playing basketball somewhere other than the NBA, he lights up when it’s suggested maybe he could return to France to play. “That’d be a nice little connection,” he says. “It’d be cool.”

Goldie, who has her master’s from TCU in Educational Foundations and Research, knows the ball will eventually stop bouncing and is making sure Bryce is prepared when that day arrives. He reps a 3.85 GPA, and in addition to conquering French, he was all-metro on the saxophone in middle school and recently took up the piano.

“It’s important for him to know that this is not your only pathway,” Goldie says. “If this is what you choose, we will support you, but just to know that in anything you do, you can be great if you put in the work.

“I’m amazed by his discipline and his work ethic, and what delights me is (basketball is) truly what Bryce wants to do. He’s not doing it because Rod wants him to do it. He’s not doing it because I want him to do it or any kind of pressure that we’re putting on him. It’s because he loves the game, he wants to get better and he has these goals that he’s set for himself and he wants to achieve them.”

It helps that his father can steer the development. Rod will hand his son off to a college coach with an advanced understanding of how to play, which is evident when you watch how Bryce operates away from the ball at both ends of the floor. He’s always engaged and in the right spots.

He says his focus over the next year before he leaves home for a college campus is to become a more efficient player and “continuing to make my teammates better. Being an energy guy, being a leader, someone that can lead the team. Not just a scorer but (getting) assists and loose balls. Little things that can ultimately help my team.”

Goldie says he’s also starting to understand the importance of taking care of his body. She sees him drinking water instead of soda, and he’s becoming cognizant of the need for sleep.

And his production is going up and up. Last weekend in New Jersey, he scored 30-plus in all four games and averaged 34.3 points and four assists.

Not surprisingly, the offers have been pouring in over the last few weeks: Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Tulsa and Michigan State.

His father, who is also his grassroots coach, has brought Duren on the road to document the journey. At the end of every visit with coaches or even an interview with a journalist, he makes sure to capture the moment with a picture.

It’s almost too good to be true.

But as the clock nears midnight on a Saturday in Overland Park, Kan., during the first evaluation weekend, it becomes clear Bryce does have at least one flaw: The kid does not get enough sleep. But, of course, he’s working on that too.

(Photo of Bryce Thompson: Kelly Kline/Under Armour)