The following is an excerpt from "The Vince Carter Story" published by Scholastic Inc., and written by Doug Smith. Carter will be signing copies of the book at the NBA Store in New York City on March 14 from 7-8 p.m. ET. Read on to learn more about Vince's high school years.

Although Carter had been noticed as a young basketball star during his preteen years, it wasn't until he reached Mainland High School that he truly blossomed into a Florida schoolboy legend. But you could never tell what he had become by the way he acted.

The one thing most people remember about Carter as a high school student was his humility. Today, it's not unusual to hear about spectacular high school basketball players signing autographs in the hallway, strutting around as if they had already made it to the NBA. But Carter, taught well by his parents long before he got to high school, would never have presumed to be better than anyone else. He was just an ordinary high school kid who happened to have extraordinary athletic skills.

The Vince Carter Story

"Everybody loved Vince because he never got cocky," Dick Toth, Mainland's athletic director, told The National Post newspaper in Canada, years after those high school days. "Other kids shy away from those types of kids, the kids who get a little full of themselves when they get a little out of the ordinary. No one ever shied away from Vince. Everybody wanted to know where Vince was going to college; it was the guessing game of the day. With a lot of kids who get cocky, nobody cares what they do."

Although he led his Mainland team to the state championship his senior year and was known as a high school basketball star, Carter's contribution to his school went far beyond his performance on the basketball court. He was involved in many other extracurricular activities. He was, and still is, a fine saxophone player and could be seen walking through the halls of Mainland toting his sax to music class as often as he was seen carrying his ball to basketball practice. In fact, his saxophone playing was so good that he was offered a music scholarship to Bethune-Cookman College, which he was very proud of but had to turn down because he knew his future was in basketball, not music.

He also served as the drum major in his high school band, which made his stepdad, the leader of his high school marching band, increadibly proud. Carter also wrote some poetry in his spare time, while carrying a B-average in his classes.

"I wasn't the greatest student, but I sure wasn't the worst, either," he recalls. "I knew I had to keep my grades up if I wanted to play basketball. If there was one thing my mom and dad stressed all the time, it was the need to study and keep the grades up so I could play ball."

His mom recalls being just as proud of her son's academic accomplishments in high school as his tremendous basketball talents. "Vince was a good student, he got good grades, he worked hard at academics, and that was important to us as a family," she said. "His hard work made us very, very proud."

Away from the basketball court and band practice, Carter was very much the normal American teenager. He and his buddies would spend countless hours hanging out at the Volusia Mall in Daytona Beach, wasting away the after-school hours. Music, as one would guess, was a big part of the scene, and Carter could often be found patrolling the aisles of the mall's record store, trying to find something to add to his impressive CD collection. He liked a lot of different kinds of music, from rap to mellow jazz and blues.

Carter often attracted a crowd because of his basketball skills and local celebrity status. Many girls would gawk from a distance, but some were brave enough to come up and start a conversation. If Carter was being particularly shy or not acting the way his best friend Joe Giddens wanted, Giddens would march up to a bunch of teenagers, tell them who Carter was, then sit back and laugh as Carter tried to deal with the attention.

"Man, he'd get me all the time." recalls Vince. "I really didn't want to stand out, but sometimes Joe would make sure I did. It wasn't very comfortable."

Carter usually felt uncomfortable because he didn't want to create a scene. To this day, he is most happy just being one of the guys, no better and no worse that anybody else. It was something hammered in at home. "So many kids come to school with baggage because they're so often from single-parent families and unstable homes; (Vince) had no baggage," said Charles Brinkerhoff, who coached Carter at Mainland. "He was just a good, normal, well-adjusted young man."