Duke’s Cameron Boozer received the 2026 Naismith Men’s Player of the Year award on Sunday after his impressive freshman season with the Blue Devils. He beat out Kansas’s Darryn Peterson and BYU’s AJ Dybantsa, his fellow star freshmen, for the award. These three players are expected to be selected No. 1, 2 and 3 in June’s NBA draft, though the order is still very much up for debate ahead of the draft lottery.
Boozer winning the Naismith award means a Duke player achieved this milestone in back-to-back seasons (Cooper Flagg won last year). But, it also means that Christopher Columbus High School in Miami swept the two major men’s college awards this season. A fellow alum of the high school is none other than Fernando Mendoza, the Indiana quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy before winning a national championship in January.
This is the first known time in college sports history in which the Heisman and Naismith winners in the same year went to the same high school, per CBS Sports’ Cameron Salerno, and they happened to attend Christopher Columbus High School at the same time, too. When Boozer was a freshman in high school back in 2021–22, Mendoza was a senior. There’s a good chance the two star athletes didn’t know each other, though, as the high school had an enrollment of about 1,700 students that year—and, there was obviously a big age gap.
Boozer admitted before Duke’s Elite Eight loss to UConn that he didn’t really know Mendoza while in high school, but he was friends with his younger brother Alberto, who was only one year older than the Boozer twins…