At thirteen, Martynas Pocius nearly lost his left hand. He was at school in Vilnius, working with a grinder, when the machine slipped and partially cut three of his fingers. Two of the fingers were re-attached. One had to be partially amputated. It is the kind of injury that, in another life, might have ended a basketball career before it started. In his case it became, by his own later framing, just the first of the obstacles his body would put in the path of what he wanted to do for a living. He kept playing.
He was born April 28, 1986, in Vilnius, Lithuania — a city that, when he was a boy, had emerged from forty-five years of Soviet occupation into the early, electric years of Lithuanian independence and the country's modern identity as a basketball-mad republic. His father, Gintaras Pocius, was a basketball coach. His mother, Jūratė, was a physical education teacher. He grew up around the game in the way that, in Lithuania, the children of basketball coaches grow up around the game — surrounded by it as both vocation and national obsession, in a country whose population is smaller than that of metropolitan Atlanta but whose senior men's national team has won a European Championship, two Olympic bronze medals, and consistent FIBA medal-table placements. By age 17 he was a 6'5" wing prospect with the early markings of a Division I or European-pro future.
In 2003, at seventeen, he made the move that would change the trajectory of his life: he came to the United States to spend his last two years of high school at Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire — a small NEPSAC Class C boarding school in the White Mountains, with snow on the ground for half the school year and one of New England's better small-school basketball programs. He played his junior season at Holderness in 2003-04, averaging 18 points and 4.5 rebounds per game and helping the team to a 17-7 record and the program's first New England Prep School Class C state championship. As a senior in 2004-05, he averaged 18 points, 5 rebounds, and 3 assists per game, leading Holderness to a 19-10 record and a second consecutive Class C title — back-to-back NEPSAC championships in the only two years he wore the uniform.
The high-school role he played at Holderness, as he would later describe it himself in his own words on LinkedIn, was unusual for someone who would soon become a Duke shooting guard:
> "In high school, I was predominantly a post player. High-low actions. Playing with my back to the basket. That's what helped me find a role, contribute, and win a state championship."
The recruiting attention came quickly. By his senior year he was ranked 40th nationally and 12th among shooting guards by Rivals.com, and 55th nationally / 16th among shooting guards by Scout.com. He was named to the World Select team for the 2005 Nike Hoops Summit — a once-yearly all-star game in Memphis pitting the top international high-school prospects against the top American high-school prospects — and led the World Team with a game-high 20 points in a 106-98 loss to the USA. His Lithuanian credentials that summer were just as serious: he had averaged 18.0 points, 3.0 rebounds, and 2.3 assists at the 2004 European U-18 Championships in Spain, shooting 43% from three-point range and making at least two threes in all seven games played. The international comparative academic record was also impressive — he had been earning A's in Holderness's college-prep curriculum despite English not being his first language.
He committed to Duke, the program he had grown up watching from Vilnius via highlight tapes. He was the 53rd-ranked recruit in the RSCI Top 100 for the class of 2005. He arrived in Durham that fall as the third Lithuanian to ever play for the Blue Devils.