Nansemond-Suffolk Academy junior Harper Birdsong has charted her future on the hardwood beyond high school.

The Lady Saints basketball standout recently made a verbal commitment to attend George Washington University and compete for the Lady Colonials starting in 2016.

She was pleased to have drawn Division I-level interest, enabling this opportunity before the start of her junior season.

“It meant so much to me,” she said. “I’m really grateful.”

Her mother, Amy Birdsong, was thrilled to see her daughter’s achievement and her enjoyment of it.

“(Harper) was floating for three days, I don’t think she touched the ground,” she said. “It’s really cool to see your kid work really hard, and then achieve such a cool thing.”

Harper had many schools interested in her, something her younger self might have found surprising.

“Ever since I started playing in fifth grade, maybe sixth grade, I wanted to play basketball in college,” she said. “I really didn’t know it was possible until maybe my 10th grade year, probably.”

She said having NSA’s Kim Aston as a coach made her believe she could do it.

Amy Birdsong specifically highlighted Aston’s role in letting different colleges know about Harper.

Aston said, “I contacted schools in the (Colonial Athletic Association), the Atlantic 10, some (Atlantic Coast Conference) schools that I felt like she could play at, some Conference USA teams and sent them some video tape of her, and I would say about probably 20 of those teams got back to me pretty quickly.”

Birdsong had a stellar sophomore season, capped by being named state Player of the Year for the Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association Division II level. She helped lead her team to conference regular season and tournament championships.

Ivy-League schools like Princeton, Harvard and Yale universities were on the list of schools that contacted her.

Birdsong received offers from schools including the University of Delaware, Old Dominion University, Fordham University, Radford University, the College of William & Mary and of course, George Washington.

Schools were allowed to contact her starting Sept. 1, but Amy Birdsong said her daughter was happy with the interest she had received prior to that.

Harper’s parents, Amy and McLemore Birdsong, had made the effort to give her an early look at different possibilities.

“We were able to take her on visits,” Amy Birdsong said, noting this was before the period when schools begin offering to pay for visits. “We tried to help her just get a feel for it.”

Harper said she decided to commit this early because she “visited a lot of schools, and I talked to so many people that I felt I had a really good understanding of what was out there, and GW, for me, it fit all of the categories,” include academics, location and the basketball program.

She is still making up her mind about a major.

“I might want to do something with marketing in the business school,” she said. “That’s probably going to be my major and the minor, something with journalism.”