In the days leading up to Friday’s Jordan Brand Classic, USA TODAY High School Sports will be publishing diaries from players to document their experiences in New York City, at practices and events related to the game. This installment is with Trenton Catholic Academy shooting guard Malachi Richardson from Hamilton, N.J. Richarson is a Syracuse signee.

I’m closer to Philly than I am to New York, so I don’t really come here that often, but New York is a great city. I’m just looking forward to playing at the Barclays Center and getting to enjoy the experience. It’s definitely on my mind that this will be my last official high school game, but it’s time to get ready to go to college.

It’s definitely hard to put it together with only a few days of practice. There’s a bunch of good players and there’s not a lot of minutes to go around. It was fun to get out there at the first practice. We got to compete a little bit, just to see how everybody was playing and feeling.

I’m just looking forward to going and playing with everybody. There’s not really a set matchup I’m interested in seeing. I just want to go out to have fun.

Since the season ended, I’ve been staying in the gym and working out and running to stay ready.

A lot of people have asked me about Syracuse. I was definitely going to stay at Syracuse matter what happened with the investigation. The coaches told me that there are losing a couple of scholarships, but we’ll be able to get into the tournament and things will be as normal.