The Branson School sits on a hilltop in Ross, California, in Marin County, just north of San Francisco — a small private boarding school surrounded by oak trees and the kind of well-resourced California prep-school athletic culture that produces collegiate athletes across many sports rather than national-recruit basketball prospects. Nicholas Joseph Sutton III spent his high-school career there from 2001 to 2005, primarily as a tennis player. The Branson Bull tennis team, in particular, was where the younger Nick first earned the kind of athletic distinction that his older brother Keith Pollak had already begun building at the same school: all-county honors all four years, four varsity letters, plus an additional letter in baseball.
The basketball was a sidelight at Branson. As a senior in 2004-05 he averaged a modest 8 points, 4 assists, and 3 rebounds per game — the line of a smart, fundamentally-sound 6'2" guard at a small-school program rather than a national recruit. The recruiting attention, when it came, was for what he wanted his next step to be rather than for the basketball box score he had compiled. He was the son of a serious family: his father, Nicholas J. Sutton (Sr.), had co-founded HS Resources Inc. (the independent oil and gas company eventually sold to Kerr-McGee Corp. for $1.8 billion), and in 2004 had founded Resolute Natural Resources in Denver — a company that would, in 2009, become a publicly traded NYSE company through a SPAC merger with Hicks Acquisition. His mother, Susan, was a retired nurse. His older brother Keith Pollak had become a first-team All-American tennis player at Southern Methodist University — the most accomplished athlete in the family. His older sister Lindsay. His two stepbrothers, Zach and Harry Guilfoyle.
The choice to add a basketball post-graduate year at The Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey — one of the most academically rigorous boarding schools in America, but not a major basketball-prep destination — was, by every signal, a basketball decision rather than an academic one. Lawrenceville's basketball program in 2005-06 had a Mid-Atlantic Prep League schedule that gave Sutton another year of competitive basketball before college. He averaged 8 points, 5 rebounds, and 3 assists per game for the Lawrenceville Big Red as a post-graduate, building the kind of additional reps that, combined with his Branson tennis-conditioning base and his family's connections to the broader Northeast prep-school basketball ecosystem, gave him a credible shot at a Division I walk-on tryout.
He chose Duke. He arrived in fall 2006 as a freshman student — and on the first day of preseason practice, he walked on. He took jersey No. 13. He was 6'2", 180 pounds, listed as a guard. He was the fifth member of the recruiting class of 2006 to join the Duke roster, alongside scholarship freshmen Gerald Henderson (the Episcopal Academy guard who would become the No. 12 overall pick of the 2009 NBA Draft), Jon Scheyer (the Glenbrook North scoring guard who would become the future head coach of the program), Brian Zoubek (the 7'1" Haddonfield Memorial center), Lance Thomas (the St. Benedict's Prep forward), and walk-ons Steve Johnson (Cheyenne Mountain HS in Colorado Springs), Ross Perkins (in his sophomore year as a returning walk-on), and Casey Peters. The Krzyzewski team that fall would be the first first-round NCAA Tournament loss of K's Duke career — falling to VCU in the round of 64 — and the freshman class Sutton joined would be the seed of the team that, three years later, would win Krzyzewski's fourth national championship.