The NCAA men's basketball tournament is full of unheralded players who slipped through the recruiting cracks, with few having as great an impact as West Virginia's Joe Alexander.

Alexander, a 6-foot-8, 230-pound junior who leads the Mountaineers (26-10) in scoring and rebounding, was either the sixth or seventh man on the 2004-05 Hargrave Military Academy postgraduate team.

At Hargrave, which recently won the national prep school championship and went undefeated (29-0) for the first time, that meant he was playing behind at least five Division I signees.

"It's a great Hargrave story," HMA coach Kevin Keatts said. "He was fully qualified, a very bright student who had a half-scholarship to a Division II school, Shepherd, if that. Nobody else had offered him.

"He came up. He worked out for us. I thought he had a chance to be really good. I could not understand why a lot of programs had not offered him. So, we took him at Hargrave and he was probably the second-best athlete I've ever had at the school besides James White."

Alexander, originally from Linganore High School in Frederick, Md., took an official visit to Tulane before Keatts got West Virginia involved.

"Coaches came in and a lot of them flirted with him and a lot of them missed on him once again," Keatts said. "I called [then-WVU coach] John Beilein because he traditionally plays with big forwards who can step out and shoot it. He came up, watched him work out and fell in love with him."

Alexander was on a Hargrave team that included Pittsburgh's Sam Young, Virginia Tech's A.D. Vassallo and Villanova's Shane Clark. All of them either had signed or committed to Division I programs before enrolling at Hargrave.

Alexander's father "was familiar with the Big Ten and there were some Big Ten schools who actually didn't think he was good enough," Keatts said. "Now, this kid's put himself in a situation where he's going to make money."

Moving up

The Virginia-Old Dominion game earlier this week in the College Basketball Invitational was the 88th of the season for Roanoke-based official Roger Ayers, who called a first-round NCAA tournament game between Purdue and Baylor last week at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C.

Ayers isn't sure if he will call any more games this season, but the highlight was the March 4 showdown between Duke and North Carolina for the regular-season ACC championship. One night later, Ayers refereed Sean Singletary's final regular-season home game, when Virginia entertained Maryland.

"To me, working Duke-Carolina at Duke was the pinnacle of my career," said Ayers, who last year received the Commissioner's Award, given to the ACC basketball official judged most compatible by his peers.

Ayers worked three rounds of the ACC Tournament for the first time, calling the semifinal between Duke and Clemson. He called an ACC semifinal game for the first time in 2007, when he also had his first NCAA game.

The blotter

Virginia linebacker J'Courtney Williams has been placed in a pre-conviction probation program after his arrest Feb. 15 on a misdemeanor charge of marijuana possession.

Williams had a hearing Feb. 25 at which his case was continued until Feb. 25, 2009. If he completes the program successfully, the charge will be dropped, although his driver's license was suspended for six months, a common punishment whether he had the marijuana in a car or not.

Williams, redshirted this past season, was one of the top prospects in UVa's 2007 signing class. He subsequently underwent surgery on both shoulders and was redshirted.

Local update

Walk-on candidates at Virginia this spring included Raymond Keys Jr., a wide receiver from Franklin County. Keys' father was one of the first black athletes at UVa and was the leading rusher for the Cavaliers' 1976 team, when he had three consecutive 100-yard games.

The younger Keys won the 110 hurdles and 300 hurdles at the Cosmopolitan track and field meet last spring in Salem.

Touching base

East Carolina athletic director Terry Holland has removed the interim tag from Mack McCarthy's title and given him a new five-year contract to coach the men's basketball team. McCarthy, a Virginia Tech graduate and former assistant coach, directed the Pirates to an 11-19 season after they had gone 6-24 under predecessor Ricky Stokes.

n Wynton Witherspoon, a member of the 2004-05 Virginia Tech recruiting class that included Deron Washington, averaged 11 points and 4.2 rebounds in his first season at George Washington (9-17). He started 14 games and was second on the team in minutes played, second in scoring, second in assists, third in rebounding and third in 3-point field goals.

Witherspoon, who averaged 6.3 points in his second of two seasons with the Hokies, has a younger brother in Lilburn, Ga., who is being recruited by UVa among others.