Demetrius Walker ranks high among the sad list of “most abused kiddie hoopsters” who were sucked up by the hype of age-group basketball only to be discarded and largely forgotten before they had turned 21.

Much of his early life was exhaustively documented in the 2010 book “Play Their Hearts Out”, which followed the one-dimensional lives of a group of kids playing for an AAU team in Southern California.

Walker had been the subject of an infamous Sports Illustrated cover story in 2005 that suggested he was the next LeBron James — when Walker was 14 years old and hadn’t yet played even one game of high school basketball.

The SI piece certainly contributed to unrealistic expectations for a kid who matured early and dunked at age 12 but then never grew past 6-foot-2 … and the last we knew he was out of basketball after being kicked off the last team he played for, at Grand Canyon University.

It was not Walker’s fault he overpowered kids his own age, when he was 11 and 12, but it was unfair of adults to project dominance, from such an early age, into the “next LeBron”.

I saw him play several times, in high school, and he seemed like a good kid, especially given the volume of attention that attached itself to him.

Now, it appears, Walker is back in basketball. He is now coaching the junior varsity basketball team at JSerra, the San Juan Capistrano parochial school at which Walker spent his junior year in high school.

Here is a link to a slamonline.com post in which it appears Walker is writing in the first person.

Thankfully, he seems OK with how his life has gone. What went on around him, when he was in grade school and junior high, might have destroyed a lot of guys.

Perhaps, in a way, it was good that the unreasonable expectations happened so early in his life that it seems like ancient history to him now.

Something that happened, attention he received, that eventually went away, pretty much before he was done with high school … and now he is doing something else entirely.

And it’s not like people stop him on the street to ask: “What went wrong when you were 14?”

He apparently got a BA as well as master’s degree at Grand Canyon and hopes to get a doctorate in business.

It is to be hoped he can find some level of normalcy from here on out. He may well have the experience to be a pretty good coach, if he wants to pursue that.

He certainly been through about as many basketball practice sessions as any man his age, and he almost certainly will never meet a JV kid who has been on the cover of SI.

What is striking about his first-person account … is that he seems to look back on his playing days with fondness. Even the SI cover which ended whatever chance he had to settle into a path that led to a decent but not glittering college career — well short of “next LeBron”.

I hope it works out for him, at JSerra.

I imagine he could provide lots of useful advice for kids being told fairy tales by adults who ought to know better.