SOUTH KINGSTOWN - He arrived here at the University of Rhode Island in September 2004, a skinny kid who didn't know how college basketball worked.

He is leaving as one of the elite players in the school's long history, only the sixth player to score 1,500 points and grab 600 rebounds, and already is the 12th all-time highest scorer.

This is about the journey.

This is about the long road that has taken Will Daniels so very far from when he first started playing basketball as a little kid in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the child of two parents who once played college basketball, to where he has become a big-time college player. About the long road that now has Will Daniels being talked about as a future professional player.

Basketball always was the family game, and from the beginning Daniels had an affinity for it. By the ninth grade he was 6-foot-5, already becoming a commodity. He had been playing AAU basketball since he was 12, was known locally, the kind of kid who gets attention.

"People were always telling me about my potential," he said, "but I really didn't know any of that."

For this is how a basketball journey starts, a kid who starts to get attention, a kid who starts to have people in his ear telling him what it can all mean someday, even if he has little idea at the time what they're talking about. This is how someone gets into the basketball culture, one that has the potential to change a life.

So it was for Will Daniels.

In the ninth grade he went to Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in the nearby suburb of Hyde Park, a school that was about 70-percent white, a different world than the one he had grown up in Poughkeepsie. In many ways basketball was the life raft in the swirling sea, this new world, these new opportunities.

He also was in the ninth grade when he got his first scholarship offer, Marist telling him that he was already on its radar screen, and that if everything worked out there would be a scholarship for him some day.

"I didn't even know what a scholarship was," he said.

Soon after, he began playing for an AAU team in Albany, about an hour away. It was a more high-profile AAU program, one that would send him around the country to national tournaments. So by the time he was a junior in high school, already the Duchess County player of the year, Daniels had a basketball future, even if he didn't know where it was going to be.

Providence College began recruiting him in his sophomore year. So did URI. The next year a lot of schools were recruiting him: St. John's, Virginia Tech, Dayton and others.

He first visited URI in the fall of his junior year, met Dawan Robinson, Dustin Hellenga and Brian Woodward. They told him that it was an up-and-coming program, that Jim Baron was a good coach, that he would have the opportunity to shine as a player there.

"I could see myself there," he said.

He showed up in the fall of 2004 and soon realized that he had no real clue as to what being a college basketball player was all about. That so much of it is getting a work ethic, learning how to deal with the older players, learning how to deal with the fact you're going to have to wait your turn; that this is no longer about high school cheers, but a business that can be as unforgiving as running into a blindside pick.

"I still thought of myself as The Man," he says ruefully. "But I was The Man getting 11 minutes a game."

Plus the team was 6-22.

So much for the cheers.

The next year he was a starter, averaging 11 points a game, but even then it was an adjustment, both on the court and off it, too. Going to class. Doing well in school.

"You start to realize that the rest of your life is going to be determined by what you do in college," he says.

So the summer before his junior year, everything changed. His attitude. His work ethic. Everything.

"I wanted it more," he says, simply. "I wanted to be good."

Maybe it was because he heard Jim Baron always telling his players that that you earn what you get in life. Maybe it was a sort of homage to both his parents and the coaches he's had in his life, the people who have guided him, pushed him, supported him.

But that summer he finally understood what it was going to take to make him a big-time college basketball player.

It's now the twilight of his senior year, and there's no question that Daniels is not the same person he was in September 2004. He is now 230 pounds, 30 more than back then. He's now 6-8, not the 6-5 he was then.

He's also a different player.

Last year, he was a first-team All-Atlantic 10 selection, fifth in the league in scoring at 17 points a game. He entered this year as one of the true elite players in the league, and has been the Rams' top scorer in this great season. He has been one of the keys in this turnaround, from the six wins in his freshman year to knocking on the door of the NCAA Tournament this year.

"This has worked out big time for me," he says. "I owe a lot to this place. I made the perfect decision coming here."

And not just the basketball, as glittering as that's been, a career that's going to live forever in the URI record book.

But in a more important way, too.

"I've changed in a lot ways," says Will Daniels, softly. "I've developed into a man."

Can a college career have a better epitaph?