MIDDLE VILLAGE, N.Y. - A newspaper clipping hangs on the bulletin board in the gym at Christ the King High School. The picture shows seven seniors on this season's girls basketball team, the one ranked second in America. Before they've played a single game of their final high school season, all seven girls have signed with Division I colleges. George Washington, James Madison, Fairfield, just to name a few.

In the photo, on the far right, with a lanky arm draped over a teammate and wearing a giant grin, is Shay Doron. She is a dual citizen of Israel and the United States who, in a single year of American high school basketball, established herself as one of the top 15 players in the nation.

Doron is going to Maryland. She is the best player on this very good high school team - a 5-foot-9 point guard with a scorer's mentality, a kid who lives to take a charge. A winner.

"One day, we're going to be buying her sneakers," said Doron's former AAU coach, Debbie Brajevich.

Brajevich, a former player and head coach at St. John's University, has been instrumental in Doron's development - keeping the family informed about camps, schools, the recruiting process as the Dorons moved from the United States to Israel and back to the United States two years ago. Brajevich knew early on what Shay Doron had, where she would go.

"Shay has the ability to go all the way, just like Sue Bird," Brajevich said. "She has the game presence, the attitude, the marketability, although she's more like Cynthia Cooper. She's big. She can shoot the three. She's very athletic."

No wonder then that Doron's mailbox in Great Neck was stuffed with recruiting letters all last year. The mailman would stop and ask Doron if she had decided yet. His bag was often too heavy.

UCLA, Stanford, Duke, Tennessee, Boston College, Vanderbilt, Harvard and Ohio State - they all hawked Doron. In the end, Doron's decision came down to Harvard or Maryland.

Harvard because of the academics, Doron said. Maryland because of new coach Brenda Frese. The 2002 national Coach of the Year had made an instant impression.

"It just clicked. She wants to win, and so do I," said Doron, who is grateful her mother, Tamari, made them detour to College Park during a drive to a camp in Virginia last year.

"Shay has a great head about her," Frese said. "We saw her play. We loved the fact that she was a driven, competitive kid. And to think that she had to overcome a whole new culture, a new system; it says a lot about her dream and her desire to be one of the best."

It didn't hurt that Maryland just opened the $108 million Comcast Center. Doron liked the idea she could come in to a program poised to rebuild.

"UConn or Tennessee are great programs, but they're factories," Brajevich said. "You're not going to see Shay at a basketball factory. Brenda did a great job with Shay, and Shay wants a challenge. She wants to bring Maryland back to where it was when [former coach] Chris Weller had them going to the Final Four."

Transition game

She can joke about it now. It has been a year since Doron went through a tough, lonely transition from her life in Israel to her life as a standout at Christ the King. Her friends and family in Israel asked Doron why she was going to America and what school she was going to attend. She chuckled.

"My father would say: 'You know, she's going to that Jewish school, Christ the King.' I even aced my religious studies class," she said.

Doron also aced Christ the King's basketball program, where girls commute from as far as the Bronx and eastern Long Island every day to play for coach Bob Mackey's vaunted team.

Christ the King has sent forward Chamique Holdsclaw to Tennessee and later to the Washington Mystics of the WNBA. Bird, the star point guard at Connecticut and another top draft pick in the WNBA, is also a former Christ the King player. It's little wonder the Doron family had few reservations about packing up in Israel and enrolling their daughter at the famous New York high school.

"Her father flew his plane down one day to check out the school and me. It was an interview," Mackey said.

That was in December 2000. Shay was a sophomore at Rotenberg High School and a star on the Israeli national team. In fact, in an Israeli basketball program that had little tradition of international success, Doron's youth teams consistently finished high in European championship tournaments. When Doron was 14, she was the most valuable player of the championship tournament in Turkey.

"The next year, in Greece, she took on the entire Russian team. No one was under 6 feet, but she won the game," said Brajevich, who flew over to watch Doron compete. By then, it was clear. Doron would have to move to America.

"It was clear we needed to be here for her. There was no hesitation. Once she decided that this was what she wanted to do, there was no question," said her father, Yuda Doron.

Yuda Doron, a former Israeli Navy Seal, was also a decathlete who competed in Israel's Maccabi Games. Tamari Doron is also an athlete. She played volleyball on the Israeli national team. This is a focused, determined family, one that recognized and encouraged Doron's athletic ability since she was little.

"When Shay was in fifth grade and her sister Netta was in seventh, they were at a Knicks camp in Kings Point. Another AAU coach called me and said, 'You've got to come see these two kids. They're out of nowhere,' " Brajevich said.

By the time Shay was 16, playing all over Europe with the Israeli national team, the Dorons knew what they had to do.

"In Europe, she was always the best player on the court. She was always winning MVP awards or defensive player of the year. She used to win games by herself. She would score 50 points," Yuda Doron said.

That didn't make it easy for Shay to make the transition. Last year was difficult, gaining exposure and staying committed to basketball while her heart was heavy, missing home, missing Israel.

"No one knows the crisis she went through last year, how isolated she felt," Yuda Doron said. "We were in the midst of that every day. She wanted to go back to Israel. She missed her friends. The language was difficult. Only we saw this, so only we know how focused she is to have gotten through that. She sacrificed 100 percent for basketball.

"Remember after Sept. 11 how people were helping everybody and how everyone was showing camaraderie? That was the feeling in New York after that day. Everyone remarked about it. But in Israel, it's like that every day, the camaraderie."

The essay Doron wrote on her college applications told her story: how hard it was to leave Israel.

"But I wanted more than anything in the world to play basketball, to come here and gain exposure and learn from the best coaches, use the best facilities. In Israel, women's basketball used to be much better, but foreign players don't want to come because they're scared and Israel has to use all the money to defend the state," she said.

Missing home

Last week, with her scholarship to Maryland in hand, Doron said she has again adjusted to life in the United States. She no longer takes her chemistry notes in Hebrew, as she did last year. But she misses home.

It turned out to be true what her parents told her. The four years she spent there, when her mother and father wanted Doron to learn her culture and live near her extended family, it changed her. When she was in grade school and living in Dallas and New York as her father worked for Texas Instruments, she felt like an American.

"I didn't talk to my mother when she told me [at age 11] that we were going back to Israel, but she was right," Doron said.

Now, when something terrible happens back home in Israel, when another suicide bomber blows up a bus or when terrorists nearly gun down a jet full of Israeli tourists leaving Kenya, Doron knows what to do. She heads for the computer and begins exchanging instant messages with family and friends in Israel.

She seeks instant reassurance, and that comes in luminescent words that beam across the computer screen. Sometimes she gets as many as 50 messages a day if there's been an attack. "We're OK," they've said, thankfully.

Her school friends in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Hasharon let her know they're safe. Her family in different cities across Israel do, too. "Don't worry," they say. Netta, a civilian officer in Israel's Navy Seals who was not allowed a leave to move with the family, checks in from her base in Atlit, in northern Israel. So do Doron's basketball friends from the Israeli national team.

"I have so many friends who live in Jerusalem. When [terrorists recently] almost shot that plane, I couldn't sleep that night," she said.

"I know I vowed I would never ride a bus in Israel, but you have no choice. So I used to take a school bus every morning. You get used to it. When you get on the bus, you look around for things that don't look right, like if someone is wearing a coat. It's so hot, no one wears a coat."

Half a world away now, Doron is steadfast: One day, she will again live in Israel. For now, though, her life is here. She vows she doesn't want to lose a game this season at Christ the King She vows she will hit the ground running at Maryland, a basketball program she wants to help put back on the map.

"I want this more than anything," she said.

Everything she has done in her life so far tells you she means it.