This story makes it evident that there really are Tasha Mack moms in the world. Devonta Pollard is one of the top ranked basketball recruits in the Class of 2012 and is now the most embarrassed recruit in the class, also.
Pollard, who is ranked No. 6 in the country by Rivals.com, is a small forward for the Southern Phenoms’ AAU squad and is being recruited by the top colleges in the country, including Duke, Kansas and Georgetown. Sounds like the big man on campus, right? Let his mom’s actions tell it, she’s the one who’s the captain of his ship.
The college hopeful’s mom is Jessie Pollard. In a recent high-profile AAU tournament game, she pulled her son from the game after he committed two errors. That’s normal for a coach, right? Of course, but the embarrassing aspect for the younger Pollard is that his mom is not the coach.
“He had made two mistakes,” Pollard told a Yahoo! Sports Prep Rally source who was sitting courtside. “It’s hard to play a whole ball game, so I had to take him out to calm him down.”
You might ask “What makes her the expert on the game?” She’s got that covered too. Jessie Pollard was the No. 4 pick of the Chicago Hustle, a team that was in the now terminated Women’s Professional Basketball League, according to an ESPN profile. The elder Pollard stands at 6-foot-2, so she’s no pushover.
Despite the fact that Texas coach Rick Barnes, Georgetown coach John Thompson III, LSU coach Trent Johnson, Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stalling and a host of other head coaches and top assistants from around the country were in attendance, Pollard’s mom found nothing wrong with pulling her son from the game.
You have to wonder if mom yanking her son from the game turned the coaches off from recruiting him. Or, if it made them want to recruit him more since they know mom will be right there at all times to keep him in line.
Either way, it’s obvious that mom knows best because he turned his game around when he came back into the game, which can be seen at the end of the video.