The Kid arguably doesn’t need any minding, despite the pressure that those ‘Ireland’s Steph Curry’ headlines heaped on his teenage shoulders 10 months ago.

Such proclamations were understandable after The Kid sank 15 three-pointers in his 47- point tally for St Malachy’s Belfast in the Subway All-Ireland Schools’ Cup U16A final.

The NBA single-game three-point record then was held by ‘Threezus’ himself, Steph Curry, whose 13 has since been outdone by one more from his Golden State teammate Klay Thompson.

Thanks to the immediacy and global reach of social media, CJ Fulton’s extraordinary feat immediately went viral.

International websites were suddenly tweeting about him and US colleges, who already had him on their radar, re-tuned their antennae.

The Kid, who has turned 16 since, simply says he knew he was shooting well that day last January but actually “wasn’t keeping count.”

His biggest individual score beforehand was 36 but he has no idea how many ‘threes’ that included, which gives you some idea of how firmly his sneakers are planted on the hardwood.

The Kid’s main focus for the next two years is getting his A-levels in Maths, Spanish and PE.

There’s no ‘practical’ involved in A-Level PE but, if there was, The Kid could probably have aced it in two sports.

Like his uncle Gareth, he played underage soccer for Northern Ireland and was also on Man Utd’s local academy books before concentrating solely on the hoops.

This season he’s moved up to U19 in schools basketball, plays U18 for his club Star of the Sea and also been prematurely promoted to Star’s Super League side with whom he trains several times a week; a massive jump in physical terms.

“In my first (Super League) game, against Swords, I was just cutting down the lane and I got banged. I stayed up but I was a bit winded!” The Kid grins.

It’s a lot tougher, the physicality of it. They’re a lot bigger and stronger than me.

Success and fame brings new challenges but The Kid’s got great genes and more than a few good people in his corner.

His sisters Jenna (13) and Katie (12) are also immersed in sport - first competitive gymnastics (Jenna competed for N.Ireland) and now trampolining, basketball and dance. Their mum Jackie was a showjumper who now works in the fitness industry. Her father, Seamie Granaghan, won two Ulster SFC titles in the ’70s with Donegal.

His dad and paternal grandfather are steeped in Irish basketball.

“I knew fairly quickly Christopher had something about him,” Adrian Fulton says, “If it had been my era he would have been older before I’d have seen that because we just weren’t exposed to so much so young, but now they’re playing U8 and U10 and you spot it (talent) much earlier.”

The Dad was a basketball prodigy himself; a kid who used to brush his teeth with his left hand to ensure he became ambidextrous.

The Dad was coached by his own father Danny - The Boss – an Irish basketball Hall of Famer who not only coached Star but Ireland’s senior men.

The Boss was coach when Star won back-to-back Superleague titles in 1998-99 and repeatedly vied for Cup glory.

The Dad earned the first of his 70 Irish senior caps when he was just 19.

His highlights include three World Student Games (WSG) in the ’90s, starting with 1991 when he found himself guarding Duke star Bobby Hurley who, two years later, was the seventh pick in the NBA draft.

In Japan in ’95 a great WSG Ireland team - including his Star’ teammate Gareth Maguire, Karl Donnelly and John and Pat Burke – played a warm-up game against an American team crammed with future NBA stars like Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson and Ray Allen.

So The Dad’s got game.

He’s St Malachy’s PE teacher and also became Star’s Super League coach this season, making him also The Coach, a role he’s tried to avoid as much as possible.

Early on I was getting friends of mine who’d played at a good level to coach CJ because I didn’t want to be coaching him all the time,” he admits.

“Loads of people have done a brilliant job in forming him as a player, like Phil Molloy, Brian McCreanor, Gerard Ryan, and Pat Price and Paudie Fleming with the national underage teams.”

Both himself and CJ credit Chuck Guitar, one of Star’s former American players, with his astonishing long-range accuracy.

The Kid remembers Guitar physically adjusting his hand placement on the ball and The Dad recalls Chuck giving him “some really simple pointers, nothing complicated”.

The Coach/Dad was loath to promote The Kid to the Super League so quickly, acknowledging that: “There is a huge jump from underage to senior basketball. When I first played national league I was 15 but Star were in Division 3 in old money then. I didn’t play in the top league until I was 20.” But circumstances dictated it.

“We planned to blood a few of our good U18s by practising once a-week with the Super League team but Conor Quinn was carrying a pretty bad elbow injury and his brother Aidan broke his wrist so, all of sudden, we’d no back-up point-guard.

“My big concern is can he handle the physicality?” The Dad admits. “I’ve no concerns about his skill level, and his onboard computer is off the charts. I wanted to hold him back but our American and Slovenian players are going ‘you’ve got to play him!’”

So The Kid is now averaging 25-30 minutes per game for the current Super League leaders for whom he has already scored highs of 20 and 15.

St Malachy’s exited the Schools’ U19 Cup in the quarter-finals but not before he scored 30 points in one game.

The Dad knows all the pitfalls of coaching him and also how much more The Kid has to contend with than he had.

“It is really hard to find the right balance. Sure I didn’t get fed for three days if we lost!” he quips.

Christopher hates the attention,” he reveals. “He was up for an award recently and was praying he wouldn’t win it but Jackie and I have said there’s a responsibility to try to run with it, within reason of course, especially as basketball’s not a high-profile sport in Ireland.

People were effusive when CJ shot the lights out in that schools’ final but, when the story was picked up by USA’s huge sports website The Bleacher Report, The Dad noticed a shift.

“They’ve got 13 million subscribers or something. The headline was ‘Is this kid Coming to a College Near You?’ and the comments weren’t nearly as complimentary.

“Some of it was still positive but some of it was stuff like ‘Yeah, he’s ready....for the WNBA’

“I’m there like ‘Christopher, do NOT get involved in this’ and he didn’t, but some of his friends were supporting him and it was going back and forth.

“We saw both sides of it, which was probably good. It tells you a lot about the world that’s right there at their fingertips now. One of the teachers in our school says social media is like a tube of toothpaste: ‘It comes out easily but it doesn’t go back in!’”

There’s been the expected raft of interest from US colleges and European basketball academies.

So is The Kid, like so many rim-rats, looking to go the US college route to his dunk dreams?

“Oh I don’t know, I’ll see how it goes in school and stuff first, I’m not sure yet,” he insists modestly.

“He is a bit of a homebird and America’s not for everybody,” The Dad stresses. “He looks at me and says ‘well you didn’t go!’ I had an opportunity and I think maybe I was a bit like him but, to be honest, he’s playing at a completely different level than I was at his age.”

The Boss is still going strong too, now 72 and visible on the end of Star’s Super League bench.

He’s flying, lives five minutes from us and has nine grandchildren. He still loves the social side of basketball. He doesn’t drink but loves travelling and meeting all the people he met 50 years ago.

The Fultons are emblematic of many great dynasties in Irish basketball. Each generation out-skills the last and continues a cycle that produces great players and coaches.

The Kid’s heroes, unsurprisingly, are long-range snipers like Curry and Kyrie Irving, the ex-Cav now with Boston.

The Celtics actually are his NBA team, a passion passed down from the father whose ass he can now hand back to him when they go one-on-one on the family hoop, though The Dad reckons “I could still take him in the post though!”

The Kid is a prodigy alright, which can bring both success and pitfalls.

Fortunately, The Dad himself always had a safe pair of hands.

Battle for the blue riband

The Subway All-Ireland Cup is the blue riband of Irish schools basketball for boys and girls.

It features over 4,000 players from 300 schools, culminating in finals at the National Basketball Arena every January.

CJ Fulton’s St Malachy’s Belfast won the U16A title last year but were knocked out in this year’s U19A quarter-finals by Cork’s Gael Coláiste Mhuire AG who now meet St Paul’s Oughterard in the last four. The other boys U19A semi-final is a mouthwater all-Tralee derby between St Mary’s CBS (The Green) and Mercy Mounthawk. The semi-finals will take place on January 7-11 (dates and venues to be confirmed).

The All-Ireland finals are on January 21-25, 2019.