HUNTINGTON (AP) — Hassan Whiteside hesitated and then took a half-step forward, stopping before his forehead made contact. While visiting his mother in Gastonia, N.C., the 7-foot Marshall basketball player found that, unlike before, moving from room to room required a head tilt or slight knee bend for him to safely clear the door frame. He ducked his head and moved on, begrudgingly accepting that his house isn’t suddenly shrinking. “He doesn’t want to hear it or believe it, but he’s going to get taller,” said Debbie Whiteside, whose son has grown 2 inches in his first year away at college. “Just watch.” People have been watching since Hassan Arbubakrr — the birth name Whiteside carried until he turned 18, when he legally adopted his mother’s surname — debuted at Gaston Memorial Hospital in Gastonia, N.C., on June 13, 1989. There was no public address announcer there to bellow his height, weight and hometown, but a physician didn’t have to moonlight as a basketball scout to forecast the child’s future on the court. Doctors, nurses and passers-by gawked at baby Hassan, who arrived two weeks early, weighing 11 pounds and 2 ounces and measuring 23 1/2 inches long. He was polishing off 8-ounce bottles of formula — 2 ounces is considered normal — before his mother was discharged. When he was back for a checkup one week later, he had grown to 13 pounds and 9 ounces and added a half-inch in length. Doctors grew concerned about his pituitary gland and showed the young parents a chart that predicted their son would eventually grow as tall as 7 feet 2 inches, one inch shorter than his great-grandfather. “We thought the doctor was joking when he said that,” said Hassan’s father, also named Hassan Arbubakrr, a former defensive end in the National Football League and Canadian Football League. Twenty years later, Hassan is 7 feet tall - for now - and weighs 235 pounds. He is the Herd’s hardwood wunderkind, a true freshman starting - and starring - at center. With a 7-foot-7-inch wingspan, the lanky athlete is the NCAA Division I leader in blocked shots. The buzz is building, sports agents are stirring, and in a rare sight, NBA scouts are flocking to Huntington. Nine will be there tonight when Marshall hosts Tulsa at 7 to size up the future pro. The problem is, as Hassan learned on that visit home, he has yet to reach his ceiling ... but he’s inching closer. His mother assured him, but Hassan didn’t believe her. He was a 6-foot, 150-pound all-state wrestler before he was a hoops star, and he thought all of those predictions doctors had made were complete rubbish. “Everybody was like, ’Where your height at?’ And then I just started sprouting up,” he said. “My mom was like, ’I told you, I told you.’ “ He grew 4 inches in the first spurt and then another 3. He blew past his two older brothers — Danney Holman and Anthony Holman — and outgrew clothing after only a couple of cycles in the wash. “He was growing so fast you could almost see him grow,” his mother said. “When he hit puberty, I’m telling you, he really hit it.” Eighteen months later, Hassan towered over his older brothers, both about 6 feet 4 inches tall; his mother, who is 5 feet 11 inches; and his father, who is 6 feet 5 inches. Hassan became concerned about the financial burden he was placing on his mother, who was working two jobs and had seven children - one daughter, the oldest of the bunch, and six sons. After his sophomore year, he decided to move to Newark, N.J., to live with his father, who “had a better job and a little more money,” Debbie said. “That’s just the type of kid he is,” she said. “He’s a great kid when it comes to stuff like that.” Arbubakrr, who was engaged to Debbie before they parted ways, was aggressive with his son’s basketball career, introducing him to area coaches and getting him more involved with organized hoops. Hassan enrolled at East Side High for his junior year. He averaged 18 points, 10 rebounds and 5.5 blocked shots and recorded his first dunk in a scrimmage against national power St. Patrick. “It’s still on YouTube,” he said. “I watched it again and just laughed. It was with one hand. I turned around and was wide open, so I dunked it.” When he wasn’t in the gym at East Side, he was honing his skills on the blacktop surface at Ivy Hill Park in the westernmost part of Newark, until an execution-style shooting at a nearby schoolyard left three dead in August 2007. “It shook Hassan up,” said his mother, who is from New Jersey but moved to North Carolina to escape the crime. “He wanted to come home.” Hassan subsequently enrolled at Hope Christian Academy in Thomasville, N.C., for his senior season, and even he had trouble counting the number of schools he attended. Now he had to decide where he was going to go next. The scholarship offers trickled in at first. “Cleveland State was my first offer,” he said. “Schools like Charlotte and Marshall came in after that.” He headed to The Patterson School near Lenoir, N.C., and verbally committed to Marshall on Nov. 1, 2008, about a month before his second senior year began at the prep school. “I committed early,” he said, “and then my other offers started rolling in.” The who’s who of college basketball tried to woo the agile big man: Kentucky, Louisville, Xavier, South Carolina, Connecticut, Memphis, Seton Hall, South Florida and St. John’s, to name a few. “It was hard not to listen sometimes because Marshall wasn’t doing so good at the time,” he said. “But my mom was like, ’Stay with it. You can go there and make a difference.’ “ Hassan has posted averages of 13 points, 8.8 rebounds and 5.2 blocks through his first 25 collegiate games with the Herd (18-7, 6-4). He bypassed the school’s single-season record for rejections — 101 — in only 19 games, and recorded the first two triple-doubles in school history. “It’s amazing how far he’s come in the last two years,” said Chris Chaney, his coach for one season at The Patterson School. “His upside is ridiculous. He’s doing there what he went there to do — block shots. That’s what he wanted to be known for; that’s his specialty. “But he’s getting better every day. Like a baby puppy, he’s growing every day.” Once a top-three finisher in a North Carolina state wrestling tournament, Hassan finds himself grappling with new challenges these days: success, stardom, scouts, sports agents and school. He tries to do it with a smile, but some days he’d rather pull a hooded sweatshirt over his face to shield himself from the attention and responsibilities. “He is a freshman that is overwhelmed sometimes,” Marshall Coach Donnie Jones said. “I was overwhelmed as a freshman. (MU assistant coach) Darren Tillis was overwhelmed as a freshman. He’s still learning. I think that’s what coming to college is all about.” Hassan incessantly flashes his grin on the court. (“He loves his teeth. He brushes them all the time. He loves having a big, white smile,” his mother said.) But the daily rigors of being a student-athlete can take their toll. Jones said Hassan is still learning time management, how to juggle practices and games, study sessions and media obligations, travel and class. He’s doing all of it while a tug-of-war over his future — to go to the NBA sooner rather than later — goes on around him. Those issues are compounded with a 7-footer’s daily plight, such as finding pants long enough or size 17 shoes or a car. Whiteside, who turns 21 this summer, still doesn’t have a driver’s license because he doesn’t have a vehicle that can accommodate his long legs. “North Carolina won’t let him take a driving test because his knees aren’t 3 inches from the dash,” his mother said. “He wants a car so bad, but his legs are cramped up in a regular car. Sometimes he wishes he could just be normal.” But Jones called his fledgling freshman a “high-spirited kid” who uses his sense of humor to combat those daily doldrums and “a lot that is still new.” That newness includes being a 7-footer, something Hassan didn’t immediately embrace. “People would run up to him in public and always ask him if he played basketball,” Debbie said. “He wanted to joke and say, ’Nah, I bowl,’ but he thought that would be disrespectful.” “When they would ask how tall he was, he would always say 6-11. He didn’t want to be known as a 7-footer.” He’s warmed up to eclipsing 84 inches, so much so that he has wondered why more fans don’t come up to him. “A lot of people are too nervous to approach me,” he said. “I don’t know why; I’m a really nice guy.” Tillis, his mentor and a 6-foot-11-inch former NBA center, grew 5 inches after arriving on Cleveland State’s campus in 1978. He said it’s possible that Hassan’s growth isn’t complete. In fact, doctors have a new prediction: that his eventual height will come within a couple of inches of his 7-feet-7-inch wingspan. Whether the growth spurts are finished or not, Debbie plans to move to West Virginia to mitigate the hype and keep her son focused on books, not NBA bucks. “Anybody who wants this kid to go play in the pros doesn’t have this kid’s best interests at heart,” she said. “They are going to want him to watch and condition for two years, so he’s actually going to sit the bench. “My son doesn’t care about money. He loves to play basketball. He loves being in the gym until you have to run him out. “The agents, the scouts, there’s so much pressure on Hassan. All he wants to do is play ball. All he wants to do is help Marshall get to the next step. “He’d much rather someone just tell him, ’Good job’ than give him money to play. He’d pass up millions until he can actually play.” Hassan spoke as if he believes his mother more than the countless mock drafts floating around the Internet. “I want to be an impact pro,” he said. “A lot of people just want to be a pro, but I want to make an impact like I did in college. It’s looking like I’m going to come back next year. “I still have some growing to do.” Chuck McGill is a writer for the Charleston Daily Mail.