Meet Harper Dunn, a 6-5 freshman from Corona quickly becoming a national name

WEST OF CORONA, N.M. – The search has ended for the unicorn story that ties together the defending women’s NCAA basketball champions from LSU and a nearly 1,700-pound Torrance County steer named Dwayne.

It ends in one of the most remote, uninhabited locations in New Mexico.

The bridge connecting the two? That would be an inquisitive, loquacious 14-year-old named Harper Dunn, a 6-foot-5 basketball prodigy at tiny Class 1A Corona (one of New Mexico’s five smallest high schools), and already New Mexico’s next major national recruit.

Never heard of Dunn? Probably, you’re not alone.

What you need to know up front: Dunn already has garnered some early interest from three of last year’s Women’s Final Four in LSU, Iowa and Virginia Tech. And a slew of other prominent national programs have also spoken to her, about 20 in all.

The University of New Mexico has this intriguing prospect on its preliminary radar, too.

Two schools — Eastern Michigan and, just last week, New Mexico State — have offered her a scholarship.

Dunn is only a freshman, so this journey has barely begun.

But Dunn knows where she wants to be.

“I’d like to go play for a top-10, top-five program,” she said confidently. “But you know, a lot of people probably say this. For me, part of what I love about basketball is that nothing is ever the same. You can’t get bored, because it’s ever changing.”

Stretching the court

Dunn doesn’t speak like most freshmen, and certainly doesn’t look much like one, either, which of course is part of the allure for college recruiters. Not to mention, how Dunn’s game might mature over the next several years. Texas Tech already watched her in person just this month.

“You can’t teach 6-5, and at the end of the day, she has height and she has a motor,” said Brandon Mason, the founder of Albuquerque’s ABC Prep. “She has time to get everything else she needs to get.”

Dunn’s profile accelerated with a Midwest-based club team, MOKAN (Missouri/Kansas), at the Run 4 Roses Classic in Louisville, Kentucky, in July. A good number of colleges to whom Dunn has already spoken first encountered Dunn in Louisville. She hadn’t even met her teammates until after touching down.

She spent a good portion of her offseason with Albuquerque’s ABC 15U Under Armour club team.

“First time I met her, she pulled up to the gym, she got out of the car, and I said, ‘Oh my God.’ She was my height,” Mason, a former NMSU basketball player, said with a laugh. “Then I found out she was 12 years old.”

Josh Skarsgard is her Under Armour coach and said Dunn is a natural shot repeller, not to mention, “she gets out of the car with a double-double.”

“Her shot blocking is the best I’ve seen for any youth girls basketball player in the state,” he said. “It’s her most dynamic basketball skill.”

Although Dunn looks completely out of place on a Class 1A basketball court, she would surely stand out in any of the state’s five classes with her length. Her father, Blair, an Albuquerque attorney, attributes this in part to a major growth spurt, which saw Harper sprout rapidly, from 6-feet as a sixth grader, to 6-3 as an eighth-grader, to where she is now, at 6-5. Maybe even 6-5½. And she might not be done growing; Blair Dunn, who once played for the legendary Bubba Jennings at Artesia, is 6-10 and a former college player himself at NMSU.

“Being tall and having a motor is like 70% of the battle,” Mason said. “And she already has that. She’s gonna be more than fine within the next three years. (She has to) let her game catch up with her body.”

Finding community in Corona

How Dunn came to play high school basketball in Corona requires some explanation.

She was in the Albuquerque Public Schools system when the pandemic struck in March of 2020.

Later that year, she was sitting around the kitchen table with family, and they realized Corona was one of the few schools that was still offering in-person learning and hadn’t been forced to go remote. The school itself, for counting purposes for the New Mexico Activities Association, has only about two dozen students of high school age.

“Harper got this look on her face, like, ‘Can I do that?!’” Blair Dunn said.

Said Harper: “I didn’t like online learning. I’m too social and I like to learn through talking to people, so it didn’t really work for me (staying in APS).”

She already was close with her grandparents, who live on a giant ranch about 22 miles west of Corona.

“And then,” Harper said, “it just presented itself at a random moment, and it just fit so perfectly. And honestly, I fell in love with the ag and the community, and Corona and how tight it is. It’s really a unit.”

She transferred to Corona in September of 2020, after being a student at Eisenhower Middle School in Albuquerque. By the summer of 2022, she was a recognized rising talent on the club basketball circuit.

Washington State was first to express interest. “That,” Blair Dunn said, “kind of built the flame in her.”

Life on the ranch

In truth, basketball might be the least interesting element of Dunn’s life, which is shared among four New Mexico counties.

“We have to drive everywhere to do anything,” Dunn said pragmatically. “You get used to it.”

She attends Corona, on the northern rim of Lincoln County, home to about 130 people (per the 2020 Census) and located a little more than 100 miles southeast of Albuquerque. If you drew a straight line on a map between Albuquerque and Roswell, Corona lands right on that line, equidistant from both cities.

The sprawling ranch, which encompasses 20,000 acres, or about 30 square miles, is in extreme south Torrance County and can be accessed only by a lengthy ride on a dirt road.

The ranch, which includes a large concrete slab (re: court) and a basketball hoop, is where Dunn spends her weeks during the school year with her grandparents. She splits her weekends — she is sometimes with her mother in Roswell and sometimes with her father and stepmother in Albuquerque.

As it happens, her stepmother is former La Cueva superstar Beky Preston, who also is Corona’s assistant coach.

Dunn is actively involved in public speaking, an integral part of the ag program in Corona. She is a champion pie eater, with a buckle to show for her victory. And then there’s her most noteworthy non-basketball hobby:

That would be the aforementioned steer, Dwayne. How is that spelled? Dunn is asked.

“Anyway you like,” she smiled. OK, Dwayne it is. Apparently, he won’t mind.

She is an accomplished “ag” kid who shows Dwayne at places like the New Mexico State Fair and also the Eastern New Mexico Fair in Portales. Next week, she’ll be showing him — for the final time — in the Phoenix area at the Arizona National Livestock show. Her father once showed steers when he was younger. Her grandfather — former State Land Commissioner Aubrey Dunn Jr. — as well.

“I love it,” she said. “It’s definitely a lot of work, but it’s also a really big payoff, and not just winning stuff, but seeing your hard work come to life is something that’s really, really great.”

Tony Johnson is Corona’s ag teacher, and has worked with Dunn and Dwayne for a couple of years. This includes advice on how to feed the animal, how to exercise him, how to groom him and how to show him.

Johnson observed that Dunn has flourished since leaving behind Albuquerque’s school system, which he described as a poor fit for her.

“She’s just Harper. Everyone is accepting here,” Johnson said. “There’s no proving yourself. She has thrived in that, she can just be herself. She is quirky and bubbly, but at the same time, when she enters a contest, she’s gonna kick your tail.”

Dunn is articulate and assured, which relates to the training involved to do public speaking. And boy, does she like asking questions.

“I question a lot, yeah,” she said. “You know, I actually think that comes from growing up in a family (which has) a lot of lawyers, so there was a lot of that around constantly, and I think it just became an aptitude. It happened naturally. … But I do like to talk, and I like relationships at large.”

Right at home

Corona, a co-op team with a single player from Vaughn, 33 miles to the northeast, is 4-3. The Cardinals are idle until Jan. 15. And while she admittedly has more polished teammates at the club level, Dunn is completely at ease in Corona, even if it is outside — far outside — the spotlight of a big city.

“I love my teammates, and it’s a really great connection, because it’s not just the basketball court. We’re so small, it goes through everything,” she said. “And maybe it’s not where coaches are gonna see me, but it’s where I’m growing as a person and a player.”

She doesn’t fancy her game after any one person, she said. Rather, it’s a compilation of players with various traits that she tries to stitch together on the floor.

Having two former Division I athletes close by (Preston played collegiately at Oklahoma) should come in handy during the recruiting process with them serving as well-informed sounding boards and mentors.

Dunn came to basketball after first playing volleyball for years.

“Then I came to Corona,” she said, “and I said, ‘OK, I’ll do basketball.’ Then I started and I loved it. Couldn’t get enough of it.”

She’s a self-described basketball junkie. But as for her recruitment, Dunn said she and her family are treating the process like a business to minimize the emotional drain.

“We made it so it’s like a job,” she said. “It’s a lot easier, so I don’t get burned out. Because it’s been a lot, to be honest. You have to treat it as a job.”

Other schools that have reached out to engage in the early stages of recruitment include Arizona State, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa State, Kansas State, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisville, Ohio State, Oklahoma State, Pepperdine, Tennessee, UCF, UCLA, Houston, USC, Stanford and Washington State.

“I can’t wait to see her develop the next four years,” Skarsgard said.

Blair Dunn said UNM, Washington State, Texas Tech, Arizona State and Iowa are probably the schools most actively recruiting Dunn at the moment.

She has taken unofficial visits to USC, UCLA, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State and NMSU. And probably Arizona State next week.

As for three of last season’s Final Four being involved early on, Dunn tried to deflect.

“This is a good thing,” she said. “This means I’m going in the right direction. But I still have a lot of work to do.”

One of her primary intentions is to retain her teenage-ness, as it were. Yes, there is basketball. And public speaking. And other steers in her future. But there’s more, she said. There has to be.

“It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of time in the gym, it’s as simple as that,” she said. “But it also means doing other things. You have to have good grades. You have to be a high-performing student. And of course, you need to have a life, too, because you need to be a well-rounded person if you’re gonna do well on the basketball court.”

Harper Dunn, at home on the court or on the ranch