Mark Causey grew up in Hall County, Georgia, in the small lake-and-mountain country that runs east of Lake Lanier and Gainesville, sixty miles north of Atlanta on Interstate 985. The Causey family was a serious athletic-and-medical household. His father, Dr. David Causey, was a longtime local physician who had played soccer at Emory. His mother, Cindy, had played basketball at Georgia Baptist. His three brothers all played college basketball: Michael Causey at TCU and Harvard, Matt Causey at Georgetown, North Georgia, and Georgia Tech, and Mark himself at Duke and North Georgia. Three brothers, three different Power-Five (or Big East / ACC / Ivy League) basketball programs, three different paths through the college game.
He attended East Hall High School in Gainesville — the small public high school that, in the early 2000s, sat in the Class 2A bracket of Georgia high-school athletics, the second-smallest of the state's six classifications. East Hall basketball, under coach Seth Vining, was a small-school program that had quietly built a Class AA state-championship-quality team around the Causey brothers. Mark was the lanky, athletic 6'3" wing — the kind of player who, in a larger-classification program, would have been a marquee Class AAAAA recruit, but in Class 2A was simply the most-celebrated small-school basketball player in the state of Georgia.
The Mark Causey East Hall record, line by line, was extraordinary:
- Career points: 2,222 — second in school history
- Single-season points: 808 — a school AND Hall County record
- Single-season three-pointers: 78 — school record
- Three-pointers in a single game: 9 — school record
- Single-game career high: 45 points in one game
- Senior year averages: 26.9 PPG, 4.6 RPG, 3.6 SPG, 2.7 APG, shooting 59.9% from the field and 41.9% from the three-point arc — a deeply unusual combination of volume scoring AND elite efficiency
- Led East Hall to a 30-2 record and the 2001 Georgia Class 2A state championship, playing alongside his younger brother Matt
- 2001 Georgia 2A Player of the Year
- Honorable mention All-American by Athlon
- First-team Class 2A All-State by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 and 2001
- Boys Metro Atlanta Prep Team selection by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution junior and senior years
- Selected to play in the Georgia North-South All-Star Game and the Georgia-Tennessee All-Star Game
For those who lived off the east banks of Lake Lanier, the name Mark Causey was, by the 2002 Forsyth News magazine framing, "still whispered every once in a while with a legendary inflection." He was, in their language, "a budding superstar basketball player in Georgia" who "led East Hall High School to a Class AA state championship at the turn of the century and was used to receiving handfuls of letters from colleges in the mail on a weekly basis."
The college recruiting trail produced multiple Division I scholarship offers — exactly the kind of attention that a 26.9 PPG / 41.9% three-point Class 2A Player of the Year in Georgia generates. He chose Duke. He arrived in Durham in fall 2001 to walk on to Mike Krzyzewski's roster — entering the program four months after the 2001 NCAA Championship Final Four and four months before the team that included Jason Williams, Carlos Boozer, Mike Dunleavy Jr., and Chris Duhon would be ranked No. 1 in the country and chasing a second consecutive title.