Put a microphone in front of Chandrea Jones’ face and right away she’s uncomfortable. If she could, Jones would scurry past the media after every game and practice and head straight for the locker room, leaving the talking to her more outspoken teammates and always-quotable head coach.

When a reporter does make her stop to talk, it’s hard to hear her quiet voice over the bouncing basketballs on the court, assistant coach Rick Moody’s yelling and other athletes at Manley Field House. Even after a polite request to speak up during a rare interview, Jones will keep her distance, fixing her gaze at a spot on the ground or the bleachers over the interrogator’s head.

Lately, though, it’s been hard for Jones to avoid the spotlight, despite her best wishes. During the weekend, Jones earned tournament MVP honors by scoring 42 points and grabbing 15 rebounds in two games at the Taco Bell Warhawk Classic while leading the Syracuse women’s basketball team to wins over Eastern Kentucky and Louisiana-Monroe. It was a coming-out party for the highly touted junior college transfer playing her first season with the Orange.

Tonight, she’ll face the Carrier Dome crowd for the first time as SU (5-1) brings its current four-game winning streak home to welcome Penn State (6-2) at 7 p.m.

Only six games into her Division I career, Jones has become arguably the most important offensive player on an improved Syracuse squad. The 5-foot-9 guard ranks second on the team in points (14.0) and rebounds (8.3) per game behind senior Fantasia Goodwin. With so much attention given to the freshmen recruiting class before the season, Jones has thus far been the most important newcomer.

Just don’t ask her to talk about her own performance – or anything else for that matter.

‘I don’t know, yeah, it’s been very overwhelming,’ Jones said, her voice already trailing off. ‘I’m not the talkative type, so, I don’t, you know…’

She was soft-spoken and shy well before she ended up at Syracuse, never needing to act as a team’s vocal leader. Her performance on the court always did the talking. She has been commanding respect with her play since high school, when she first caught the eye of SU head coach Quentin Hillsman, then an assistant at Alabama.

When Jones was a senior three years ago at the Institute of Notre Dame, a high school in Baltimore, Hillsman discovered a player with a developed offensive game clearly capable of succeeding at the collegiate level and took immediate interest. In high school, she was the two-time All-Baltimore City Player of the Year with a career scoring average of more than 21 points per game.

But poor grades initially kept Jones out of NCAA basketball, so she signed on with Odessa (Texas) College, one of the top juco programs in the nation. At Odessa, Jones really made a name for herself, leading the Lady Wranglers to a national title in her second year by averaging 22 points and eight boards per game.

Still, despite her success, Jones managed to keep her reserved demeanor, never having to face a horde of cameras. Even as a junior college All-American, she stayed in the background, rarely talking about her own play to anyone.

‘She’s a basketball player, not a talker,’ said Nate Altenhofen, Jones’ coach at Odessa and current head coach at St. Ambrose (Iowa) College. ‘She’s not someone who’s going to be vocal a lot because she’s shy. But she doesn’t play shy. You just gotta let her play and not worry about her.’

Hillsman apparently took Altenhofen’s advice, as he followed Jones through her juco career after he left Alabama for Syracuse. When it came time to sign with a D-I program, Jones never thought twice about choosing the Orange, considering Hillsman’s longtime loyalty and dedication to her development.

Coming out of juco, Altenhofen said Jones needed to improve her defense, and she has indeed looked slow at times in both zone and man defenses at Syracuse. But right away, she has shown the offensive ability that impressed Hillsman three years ago.

Though she has thus far struggled with her perimeter shooting – a strong point last year at Odessa – Jones has been a capable slasher able to finish near the rim and has rebounded considerably better than her size would suggest.

‘She’s playing like Kobe Bryant right now,’ Goodwin said. ‘She’s the backbone of the team. She makes plays when there is no play to be made. We needed a scorer, and she’s been our big scorer. The backbone – when she breaks, we fall.’

It didn’t take long for Jones to showcase her ability. In her first game this season, a 65-61 win over Coppin State, Jones led the Orange with 17 points. Through the team’s first six games, she’s tallied double digits in all but one.

Heading into the year, most expected standout sophomore Nicole Michael to carry the team with help from Syracuse’s best recruiting class in program history, highlighted by McDonald’s All-American Erica Morrow. Even her coach, the man who recruited her for three years, admitted he is a little surprised by her early success.

‘She’s been awesome,’ Hillsman said. ‘She’s been tremendously, tremendously improved from game to game. She’s been very physical and aggressive playing at the rim. She’s been everything I thought she would be. When it’s all over, I think she’ll exceed all expectations I had of her.’

Already it appears Jones has quickly embraced her role with the Orange, in which she can lead with her play and not with her mouth. Goodwin has stepped into a key vocal position, as has Michael. So while they and Hillsman handle the attention, Jones handles the floor.

Yet Jones knows she can’t hide behind her shyness forever, especially as more and more reporters start requesting her time. With each interview, she starts to look a little more comfortable, sound a little more confident.

Just a little – and then she once again becomes nervous. She’s showing what she has on the court. Slowly, she’s showing what she has underneath.

‘It’s been a little easier,’ Jones said. ‘It’s getting a little easier every day.’

Published on December 5, 2007 at 12:00 pm