Kiana Brereton and Sky Castro, who are both 6’2″, are the second and third female Summit Academy Charter School athletes to receive Division One basketball scholarships.
Castro, who started at Summit in the eighth grade, will be attending St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. Brereton, whose first year at Summit was when she was a freshman, will be going to the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark in the fall.
Head coach Dytanya Mixson calls Brereton and Castro his “twin towers.” David Robinson and Tim Duncan also had the twin towers nickname.
They rank at the top of the record books at Summit. Brereton is an elite scorer who has scored over 1,100 points in her high school career and has scored 40 points in a game. Castro is a rebounding star who was 25 rebounds away from 1,000 going into the playoffs.
Castro finished as the leading rebounder and Brereton as the second leading scorer in Summit Academy history, and Mixson thought this is a great legacy for them to leave behind as their high school career concludes.
Castro and Brereton, who have been teammates on Coach Mixson’s Lady X-Men AAU (competitive travel basketball) team since middle school, chose their colleges for different reasons. Castro picked St. Peters partly because of its closeness to home and that she could make an immediate impact, and Brereton’s choice was predicated on the engineering department, which she plans to major in.
“I felt like I could make a name brand for myself,” Castro added before a practice preparing for the playoffs. “I didn’t have to follow behind anybody else. I could make my own legacy at that school.”
She decided in September that she would attend the Jersey City school that was the first university to give her an offer. The other schools that recruited her were Towson, St. Bonaventure, Stony Brook, Wagner and Wichita State in Kansas.
When she finally made the decision to attend St. Peter’s it was a huge relief for her.
“It was like a weight lifted off my shoulders because I finally found the right school for me,” Castro, who lives in Queens, said.
Castro, wants to major in pre law. She wants to be a lawyer and pursue criminal justice, and this choice came from a favorite TV show of hers and her ability to be convincing.
“I decided on this because I am argumentative, and I can prove my point,” Castro said. “I have always wanted to be a lawyer because I have always watched Law and Order. That’s where it came from.”
Brereton, who is a prolific scorer, felt that NJIT was a perfect match for her based on her interest in wanting to pursue basketball as well as engineering in college.
“I want to major in mechanical engineering,” Brereton said. “Engineering is a big part of their program and basically what they stand for. I will be able to play basketball and do two things I love. That’s how I knew the school was perfect for me.”
NJIT just started recruiting Brereton on January 5 of this year, but Coach Mixson has known they would be the perfect school for her for the last two years.
Mixson reached out to NJIT last year since he knew that Summit’s all time leading scorer loved engineering and that they were known as an engineering school. That’s why he knew it would be a perfect match to get the attention of the coaches at NJIT.
“On January 5, their assistant coach hit me up, said we are looking for a post player, and she has to have at least an 1,100 SAT score and at least a 3.7 GPA,” Mixson said. “I sent her film and that was it. They were sold. It developed in two weeks and then she was signed.
Castro’s long-term career goal is to play basketball professionally either in the WNBA or overseas. Being a lawyer is her second option if basketball does not work out.
Brereton wants to be a mechanical engineer and work for a company to design buildings. When asked if she would want to play pro basketball, she said, “It’s a possibility.”
For many years, the Staten Island native who moved to Brooklyn at the beginning of high school to make the commute to school easier, has enjoyed building and designing, which is where her passion for engineering and science came from.
Brereton, who started playing basketball when she was in third grade, is looking forward to living somewhere new and adjusting to being around new people all the time.
“It is going to be different being away from home, not being that far, but not being home every single day with my mom,” Brereton said. “I will be with my teammates and my classmates and at my school all the time, so that is going to be different. I am looking forward to that, being in a different culture and being around a different team.”
Coach Mixson thinks Brereton and Castro have both made vast improvements to their basketball abilities during high school, helping them get their scholarships.
“What I notice from Kiana is that her approach to the game is more serious,” Mixson said. “‘I am going to show that I am a D1 athlete.’ That is her mental approach. She has gradually gotten better and better every year.”
Mixson thinks that Castro has developed her maturity over the years.
“Coming in as a freshman, she really was not focused on the task of being a professional athlete,” Mixson recalled. “Each year she has gotten better at it.” According to her longtime coach, St. Peter’s is the right school for her.
“It worked out perfect with St. Peter’s because there is no one in front of her when it comes to creating her own legacy because they are missing height,” he explained. “She will be able to come in with the opportunity of playing right away. That was a big sell with St. Peter’s.”
Led by Castro and Brereton, Summit is set to have a memorable postseason run. In 2019, they won one playoff game as the number six seed, and this season, they are the number four seed and will look to advance further after getting a bye in the first round.
Brereton’s goal is to put Summit on the map and become the first charter school to win the PSAL AA championship.
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