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Conditions at Florida Prep were deplorable for the foreigners on the basketball team in the fall of 2005. Some of them lacked beds. Some had to deal with a broken septic system in their team house. And some, like N'Diaye, weren't fed nutritional meals on a regular basis. He lost about 10 pounds.

"Having international people coming to a country with pretty much nothing, you expect more than just what they gave us. They didn't give us enough to be healthy," N'Diaye, a 21-year-old, 6-foot-11, 235-pound junior center said Wednesday at Rutgers' media day.

"He wasn't feeding us," N'Diaye added, referring to Florida Prep principal Steve Rodriguez. "They [were] treating us just like animals, pretty much.

"We decided one day at 3 o'clock in the morning to get up and just pack our bags and leave."

N'Diaye and his future fellow Division I athletes left one prep school for another by van, and then plane, in the dark of night, traveling 3,000 miles cross country in the process.

You may have heard of the transferring player, but this is the tale of the transferring team.

From Senegal to the U.S.: Had it not been for Babacar Sy, N'Diaye might never have left his home in Dakar, Senegal.

A native of Senegal, Sy opened the Babacar Sy Basketball School in Dakar in 2000. He later became the head coach of the Senegalese Under-18 National Team, and the assistant coach of the U-20 team. (Sy was not available for this story because he was overseas attending to his father's death.)

When Sy first spotted N'Diaye, he knew the tall young man had potential and so he approached him.

"Do you want to learn the game of basketball?" Sy asked N'Diaye.

"Why learn basketball when I have school?" said N'Diaye. The youngest of six siblings, he played soccer and volleyball at the time but had been raised by his parents to value education over athletics.

"I can show you things and you might have the opportunity to make it to the United States and have a better education," Sy told him.

Soon Sy was teaching N'Diaye the fundamentals of the game: how to catch the ball, how to dribble and how to shoot. By 2004, N'Diaye participated in the Basketball Without Borders Camp in Johannesburg, South Africa. The event, sponsored by the NBA, featured 100 of the top prospects on the African continent and included instructors and guest speakers Dikembe Mutombo, Samuel Dalembert and Alex English.

It wasn't long, N'Diaye said, before he got a call from a Baylor University assistant coach offering him the promise of a better life.

"They called me on the phone," N'Diaye recalled. "I wasn't speaking good English, so I wouldn't be able to repeat to you what exactly they said. The only words I understood were 'scholarship' and 'America.'

"I said, 'Hey, why not?'" N'Diaye recalled with a wide smile.

And with that, N'Diaye left his family in 2004 and journeyed to the U.S. without knowing a single word of English. His first stop was Life Center Academy in Burlington, N.J.

But he didn't stay long.

Fearing for his health: After Sy, then an assistant coach at the College of Southern Idaho, was hired to coach at Florida Prep in March 2005, N'Diaye followed his mentor. That Sy was interviewed for the position by Rodriguez, then the principal, at a Hooters restaurant might have been a clue that this story would not end well.

"It's a family restaurant," said a member of the three-person Florida Prep school board who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that his name not be used. "I take my wife and kids there."

What Sy didn't know was that the school was basically bankrupt and planned to use the basketball team to help generate income.

"The plan was to raise the awareness of the school and use it in the marketing of the school," the board member said. "We got in way too far over our heads. I was in the hole like 40 G's when I got done with that place."

Soon after being hired, Sy headed back to Senegal to recruit players for the team, according to a story in The Washington Post. He ultimately secured nine foreign players. N'Diaye's teammates at the now-defunct school included Pierre Niles, now at Memphis; Ibrahima Thomas (Oklahoma State), Mamadou Diarra (Southern California) and Boubacar Sylla and Djibril Thiam (Wyoming).

Florida Prep, in return, provided the necessary I-20 forms that proved the school would enroll the students. The only problem? The school wasn't at all prepared to feed, house and teach these tall foreign teenagers, who seemed to turn up at the airport needing rides to school on a daily basis.

"We were too nice," the school board member said. "We brought in too many kids for free and fed them and housed them and they weren't paying anything. We didn't have enough regular students to sustain all the expenses." The board member said the school had "30-40 other [non-basketball playing students]."

N'Diaye said the players who worked hard at practice were rewarded with food, and those who didn't were not.

"They would say if you don't go hard at the end of practice you're not going to have a double-cheeseburger from McDonald's," he said.

"They never had enough money to feed us," Patrick Kunganzi, an assistant coach who lived with the players, told The Post. "Those kids wouldn't eat for like two days at a time. They were starving, man. Starving."

The Post reported that the school provided the team $250 per week for food. The Florida Prep board member who did the shopping says he can't recall how much he spent on a weekly basis, but says the players never went hungry.

"There was plenty of food, the kids were all eating," the board member said, adding an expletive in his denial. "I was in charge of buying the food most of the time. I went grocery shopping and fed those [players] plenty of food."

N'Diaye recalled that the Muslim players on the team, of which he is one, couldn't each much of the food that was purchased because it violated their religion.

"Half of the food would maybe be pepperonis and pork and stuff like that," N'Diaye said. "Stuff that we cannot eat because of our religion. If you have six pizzas and three of them are pepperoni, we're not going to have enough."

The board member insists that Sy "brainwashed" N'Diaye and the other players to say negative things about Florida Prep.

"All that's [baloney]," he said. "Babacar made that up. Babacar brainwashed all those kids to say all that."

Meantime, Rodriguez, the then-principal who could not be reached for comment for this story, had forged Sy's name on a renewal application to the Florida High School Athletic Association, triggering the association to ban Florida Prep from the 2005-06 season.

Sy was fed up. He called Kunzagi and instructed him to pull the players out of school and take them to the airport.

Sy had already negotiated a way for most of the players to shift schools from Florida Prep to Stoneridge Prep in Simi Valley, Calif., where Sy would ultimately become the new head coach.

Ironically, Stoneridge had lost its team when its previous coach moved all the players to nearby Cavalry Christian School in San Fernando, Calif., which offered dorms and cheaper tuition.

N'Diaye and seven of his teammates packed up their things and left Florida in a rush in the middle of the night.

"Babacar pulled them out in the middle of the night," the board member said. "He had a deal cut with Stoneridge. The next morning none of the kids were at school. We went to the house where they were living and all their [stuff] was gone."

A dozen other players remained behind at Florida Prep, the board member said.

A new life in California: N'Diaye and his teammates landed in Los Angeles and stayed in a Motel 6 near Simi Valley.

"It was a big drama going on in Florida so the whole team went to Stoneridge in California where it was my senior year of high school," N'Diaye said.

Mike Mahoney, a businessman who ran Stoneridge Prep, offered to fund the team for a year at $150,000, The Post reported. He rented the new team a house, paid for all player travel and scheduled and purchased every team meal. Some took place at restaurants, others were catered. Mahoney also paid for Sy's cell phone bill and for the team to practice daily at a health club, sometimes twice a day.

Mahoney's goal was to establish seven or eight similar programs out west and hoped to ultimately form a league and making a profit by charging some players tuition and giving others scholarships.

Stoneridge was not perfect, but N'Diaye said he enjoyed his time there.

He graduated and was recruited by Miami, Pittsburgh and Rutgers, among others, ultimately choosing Rutgers. A year ago, he averaged 5.2 points, 5.9 rebounds and 3.0 blocks.

Rutgers and beyond: This past summer N'Diaye was named MVP of the Rutgers Summer League after averaging 11.7 points, 12 rebounds and 7.4 blocks.

N'Diaye worked this summer on developing his offensive game, and believes he can make an impact on that end.

"'H' has been terrific," Rutgers head coach Fred Hill said. "Here's a young man that really played soccer before coming to the United States. He really didn't understand the nuances of the game of basketball, so everything that he does is new. But he's developed so much in two years it's really been a pleasure to watch. I'm really happy for 'H' and where he's come.

"I still think his best basketball is going to be five years down the road and I think we're going to see him I the NBA one day.

Hamady N'Diaye finally feels comfortable. He is one of the most popular athletes on campus, with friends everywhere and loud support from the fans at home. He talks of returning to his native Senegal after college to help build hospitals and basketball courts so the younger generation can benefit from what he has accomplished.

He is a long way from those dark days at Florida Prep, and for that he gives thanks.

"I'm really thankful," he said. "I don't think we would've been able to make it over there."