Less than 24 hours after dropping 24 points on Canby to send Summit to the Class 5A boys basketball state tournament, Pearson Carmichael was back at his home away from home.

On Sunday afternoon, it was the small gym with two basketball hoops at Boss Sports Performance, one of several gyms at which he can often be found in Bend. Most days, Carmichael puts on his size 14 Nikes, cranks up the tunes and gets at least 500 shots up.

“This is where I let everything go,” Carmichael said. “This is where I come and feel free.”

Life on the court is vastly different for the second-youngest player on the Summit roster than it was just 14 months ago.

Back then, he was a sophomore rotation piece on a senior-heavy Summit squad about to make a run at a state championship. Now, he is the focal point of the Storm, days away from attempting to make another run for the program’s first state title.

Back then, playing college basketball was just a goal. Now, as a junior, he’s committed to playing Division I hoops for Boise State.

“I would have wished that all that was going to happen,” Carmichael said. “But I would have said you were dreaming.”

Pearson watched as his older brother Hogan — his basketball teammate, role model, and quarterback of the football team — capped off a football season in which he was named 5A state player of the year and won a state title, while earning a football scholarship to the University of Idaho.

If all goes well, Pearson could have a similar ending, but on the hardwood.

With dreams being realized came added stress both individually and for the team to succeed. Wednesday through Friday at the state tournament at Gill Coliseum in Corvallis will bring the biggest challenge for both Carmichael and the No. 1 Storm (19-5), who play No. 8 North Eugene (16-9) in a state quarterfinal Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. If Summit wins it will play the winner of No. 5 Mountain View and No. 4 Redmond in the state semifinals on Thursday night.

“How to deal with pressure has been a big part of this year and the upcoming years,” Pearson Carmichael said. “Being a kid from a small town being committed to a Division I school, you get all the noise. That is what I have been working on, is tuning out the noise and playing my game.”

The noise began to amplify about this time a year ago when Carmichael began his ascent from being a rather unknown player to one of the state’s top players, and it has yet to calm down.

“It is a testament to his work ethic,” said Summit coach Jon Frazier. “He is calling during the offseason four to five times a week to get into the gym to get shots up. He is reaping the rewards of that effort.”

The exponential rise of Carmichael perhaps was best displayed when the Summit basketball team was watching film prior to last year’s state semifinal matchup against Mountainside, a rematch of its eighth game of the regular season.

Hardly showing up on film during the rewatch was Carmichael, still working his way into carving out minutes on the senior-heavy team.

But when the Mavericks and the Storm met again at the Chiles Center in Portland two months later with a spot in the state championship game on the line, Carmichael scored 12 points in 15 minutes off the bench in a 73-61 victory.

Back at the hotel after the game, his phone rang. It was the University of Portland, offering a basketball scholarship.

“Then it took on a life of its own,” said Pearson’s father, Eric Carmichael.

Club team breakout

Julian Mora and Caden Harris played key roles in propelling Carmichael’s upward trajectory. Two teammates who took Summit to heights never seen before last season played their club ball in the spring and summer with the team Players Play, which is based in San Diego.

Players Play founder Sterling Jones came to Bend to watch Harris and Mora play. The two seniors who had taken Carmichael under their wings planted the seed in Jones that there was a sophomore on the team that might be worth bringing into the program.

“They said he had a shot,” Jones said.

Carmichael joined Players Play shortly after Summit’s season ended, but he did not get off to the best start on the club team.

In the championship game of Carmichael’s first tournament for Players Play, Jones wondered whether or not his new player had the trait that every great basketball player possesses — an “it” factor.

In the Las Vegas Big Time tournament last July, during warmups of the championship game, Jones let Carmichael know that there were assistant coaches from Pepperdine — where he had already taken a recruiting visit — there to see him play.

“He told me to be myself,” Carmichael said. “That was the first time I felt pressure in the game of basketball.”

Admittedly, Carmichael showed the coaches exactly who he wasn’t.

Offensively, he was hunting highlights by forcing contested 3-pointers and trying to throw down dunks. While he said he rebounded pretty well, his defensive effort wasn’t up to snuff. In short, he said he was trying to do too much.

“Pearson folded,” Jones said. “He freaked out that there was one guy there to see him play.”

Jones continued to put the ball in Carmichael’s hands and gave him a long leash on the basketball court so that the next time the eyes of college coaches were on him, he would be able to be himself.

And he was.

It was at the Cali Live tournament in Irvine, California, where coaches from 40 different schools on the West Coast were on hand, that Carmichael had his breakout moment, Jones said.

He had a different approach this time around. He sought out to defend the opposing team’s best offensive player.

“I was showing them that I was someone they wanted in their program,” Carmichael said.

After that showing, coaches from throughout the West Coast were calling to get Carmichael and his family on campus for a visit.

An influential coach

Offers rolled in from UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego and Pepperdine, and unofficial trips were taken at Oregon State and Washington State.

But the plan was in motion to somehow land at Boise State.

It wasn’t just because it was a program where he felt at home (a bigger Bend with mountains, rivers and golf, he said). And it was more than just the Broncos coaches seeing him as their guard of the future, one that could step in and start as a freshman and perhaps be the Mountain West Conference Freshman of the Year.

An influential coach believed Carmichael would be in good hands in Boise.

James Johnson, a prominent youth basketball coach at the grassroots level on the West Coast, moved to Bend at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and began working with local youth hoopers in the area.

He became an influential figure for Carmichael, who had met him before he started playing high school ball while Johnson was holding clinics at the Bend Hoops facility.

“He helped me build confidence to where I could play with swagger,” Carmichael said. “It brought a different type of edge to my game by the way he worked and communicated with me.”

Johnson died on Jan. 24, 2022, after a battle with cancer.

About a month before his passing, Johnson and Carmichael talked for the final time over the phone, knowing that time was short. It was an emotional conversation that started with Carmichael thanking him for the relationship the two had forged, but then it turned into a talk about basketball and goals for the rest of high school and plans for college.

Johnson had tight relationships with Mike Burns and Roberto Bergersen, two of the Boise State assistant coaches.

The decision was clear after talking with Johnson. Playing for Boise State became the goal.

On Nov. 11, 2022, shortly after receiving an offer, Carmichael committed to being a Bronco.

“Once the offer came in I knew I had to take it,” Carmichael said. “I couldn’t pass it up.”

According to Prep Hoops Oregon, Carmichael is the only player in the top-20 ranked players in the class of 2024 to have given a verbal commitment.

“The pressure of all the offers and coaches calling you was crazy,” Carmichael said. “So I committed, and just started grinding for the upcoming season. I think that is part of the reason why this season is going so well.”

Summit rises to the top

A decade ago, Summit was not considered one of the state’s top teams nor in the conversation of winning state titles.

When Frazier took over the program in 2011, the Storm had yet to have a winning season. They nearly reached the mountaintop last season by reaching the 6A title game, in which they lost to Tualatin 67-49, but are back in the hunt once again as the No. 1 seed in Class 5A.

“It has been a fun challenge to create a winning culture,” Frazier said.

The success of last year’s team combined with moving down a classification has put a sizable bull’s-eye on Summit.

And in the first half of the season with an entire new starting lineup and program stalwarts like Mora, Harris, Carson Cox, Truman Teuber and Shane Arnold moving on, there were struggles early on. The Storm had more losses in the first three weeks of this season than they had in the previous two years combined.

“All those guys were four-year varsity players, they had been leaders since they were freshman,” Carmichael said. “Stepping into a leadership role wasn’t something that I was used to.”

But Summit eventually found its way, winning the grueling Intermountain Conference and entering Wednesday’s state quarterfinal against North Eugene riding an eight-game winning streak and having won 11 of its last 12 games.

“It was a work in progress those first six to eight weeks of the season to learn how we could be successful,” Frazier said. “The pieces have fallen into place to accomplish something pretty special this week.”

Prior to last year’s second-place 6A finish, the Storm made three consecutive 5A state tournaments from 2015 to 2017, with the best finish coming in 2016 when the Storm finished third.

If there is a year to bring a state championship to one of the few program’s at Summit that doesn’t have one, Carmichael says it is this year.

Watching his older brother Hogan, a senior, tear up after playing his final home game for Summit in the victory over Canby on Saturday night, the younger brother who has seemed to handle any pressure thrown his way this past year is now putting the pressure on himself to deliver at Gill Coliseum this week.

“I got to do it for (Hogan), I got to do it for this team,” Pearson said. “I’m hoping we can come out with a state championship. But that is only going to happen if we are locked in.”