01:14 AM CST on Monday, December 27, 2004
By C. ANTHONY MOSSER / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

PLANO – Plano's Joseph Fulce laughs as he sifts through his memories of Michigan's Fab Five basketball team of the early 1990s.

Junior swingman Joseph Fulce leads the Wildcats with 18.2 points and 7.3 rebounds per game. The celebrated quintet included Fulce's cousin, Jimmy King, a 1991 Plano East graduate who was part of what is regarded as college basketball's most heralded recruiting class.

"Oh, yeah, cousin Jimmy," Fulce said. " He introduced me to them all."

While the connection to King – Fulce's father, Joseph, Jr., and King's mother, Nyoka, are siblings – helped steer Fulce to basketball, it wasn't the only factor.

For one thing, Fulce was born in 1987 and was too young and carefree to understand what the hoopla surrounding the Fab Five was all about.

"The biggest thing I remember is how my mom used to make me get dressed up before we'd go to one of Cousin Jimmy's games," Fulce said. "I used to hate that."

Cousin Jimmy's accomplishments were more of an inspiration to Fulce's older sister, Jessica, a 2001 Plano graduate, who set her sights on earning a women's college basketball scholarship.

She did so and is now a senior captain at Arkansas-Pine Bluff. Along the way, she got her younger sibling interested in the game.

"I remember she [Jessica] went to a Nancy Lieberman basketball camp and came home saying we've got a new game to play," Joseph said.

The younger Fulce figures to follow his sister into college basketball. So far, Texas A&M and SMU have been the most persistent of what figures to be a steady stream of colleges that will pursue Fulce, a 6-6 junior swingman.

Fulce is averaging 18.2 points and 7.3 rebounds per game, both team highs, as the Wildcats begin play in the Plano Wildcat Holiday Classic today.

"It's not a situation where colleges are looking at Joe and thinking 'here's a 6-6 post man. I wonder how well he'd play the two or three,' " Plano coach Tom Inman said. "He's already got the face-up [facing the basket] game."

He also can handle the ball. When not playing against his sister in driveways or gymnasiums, Fulce often could be found dribbling a basketball.

"It was too hard to dribble on the grass, so he'd always dribble up and down the sidewalk," Jessica Fulce said. "He'd constantly be dribbling a basketball."

The memory remains vivid to him as well.

"My parents told me to stay out of the street, so I'd dribble on the sidewalk and I had to be careful so the ball wouldn't go in the street," he said, mimicking the pattern of changing hands time and again. "I still do it that way in games sometimes."

Fulce offered a glimpse of his talent as a sophomore, when he served as Plano's sixth-man. He averaged a modest 8.5 points per game last season, but often provided the team with an offensive spark, showing the ability to score inside and out.

A 15-point effort in an early-season overtime loss to Duncanville served as an eye-opener. He scored 14 points, including 10 in the fourth quarter, of a key 62-57 win over then-district rival Lake Highlands, coming to the rescue after senior guard Abdullah Lawal had fouled out.

Even though he didn't start, he had showed enough to be ranked the 10th best sophomore in the state by Mike Kunstadt's Texas Hoops.com recruiting service.

"Unlimited upside," Inman said. "That's what people see in Joe."

That upside is a product of his versatility and size. At 6-6 and a lithe 185 pounds, Fulce relies much more on finesse than power. He wears a size 17 shoe and has a 42-inch sleeve, numbers that are as appealing to college recruiters as his scoring average and 56.8 field goal percentage.

"You look at his size and his skill-level, and he loves the game," Inman said. "He's only going to get better as he gets stronger."