Most prized high-school basketball recruits spend the summer before senior year frantically deliberating with parents and coaches about which colleges they should consider visiting and which ones they should cross off their ever-growing lists.
But by early July, 6-foot-1 point guard Zack Rosen had already narrowed his list down to one: Penn.
A standout player on the AAU circuit and for St. Benedict's Prep in Newark, N.J., Rosen received offers from about 20 schools, including Rutgers, Seton Hall, Virginia Tech, Iowa State and George Washington. Before he committed to the Quakers, he was also being recruited by Stanford and Vanderbilt.
But according to Rosen, it was a strong "combination of academics and basketball" that drew him to Penn, which had been recruiting him heavily for a couple of years.
"Stanford and Vanderbilt had started recruiting me before July, but I didn't really want to wait for them because I felt really comfortable that I was going to be an impact player at Penn," he said.
Rosen was also attracted to Penn because of its basketball prominence on the national level and frequent NCAA tournament appearances.
"[Penn] is probably the only type of Ivy League school that plays the schedule that they play," he said. "I didn't feel like I was going to a typical Ivy League program; I felt like I was going to a really good basketball program that was going to go out and play everyone."
With the burden of the recruiting process behind him, Rosen is now focusing on getting ready for his senior season. But he has had a setback, suffering a stress fracture weeks ago that is healing in a cast now and has had him hobbling on crutches.
At St. Benedict's, he is teammates with Samardo Samuels, who recently committed to Louisville and is considered by the recruiting Web site Scout.com to be the best high-school center in the nation.
According to Rosen, the strongest part of his game is his ability to "make the guys who I'm playing with better."
In order to prepare for the transition to Penn, he said he will have to work on his overall athleticism while continuing to improve his shooting.
When Rosen gets his cast off next week, he will pick up his strict training regimen - which involves up to four hours per day of lifting and basketball - to prepare himself for the future.
"I expect to come [to Penn] and work as hard as I can, and wherever that takes me, that takes me," he said.
