varsity.roanoke.com

Two summers ago, Mallory Jones spent a week or so with her cousin Erin Kerner up at Quinnipiac College in Connecticut. She had a great time scrimmaging with Kerner’s Bobcats teammates, and on the way back home Mallory’s dad asked her two important questions.

“What do you want to do with this?” Chuck Jones asked.

Mallory said she wanted to someday play Division I college basketball.

Division I has a lot of levels, her dad pointed out. “What level do you want to play?”

At the highest level, Mallory said. “With Tennessee and people like that.”

Those answers set Mallory Jones on a path to becoming last season’s Timesland Sizzlin’ Sophomore of the Year. Then they sent her right on out on out of Timesland altogether. While her former teammates at Blacksburg High School and other public schools in the area prep for their 2009-10 seasons, Mallory has already started her junior campaign at Oak Hill Academy just outside Mouth of Wilson.

“We can’t serve a kid like Mal,” said Blacksburg head coach Roger Henderson, who was an assistant there in Mallory’s freshman and sophomore seasons. “She wants to go to a higher level. She’s really the only basketball girl at our school. There are other girls that love basketball, that it’s their favorite sport, but she wanted to play every day and she wanted to play against better competition.”

More than that, Chuck Jones said, Mallory wanted to be challenged.

“She wants to be good, if not great,” Chuck Jones said. “We have high standards, especially for effort, whether it’s schoolwork, or sweeping the floor, or raking the leaves, or chopping firewood.

“If you’re going to do it, do it well.”

Mallory said she saw a drop-off in high school play after spending her summers playing for coach Randy Dunton’s Team Virginia AAU squad.

“It would throw me off a little bit to go from AAU, playing against great competition,” Mallory said. “High school is too — not a step down — but it’s not to where I have to be to keep my game up.”

Not only was she playing a different level of basketball, but she was playing a position that she is not likely to play if she lands that scholarship with a big-time program.
Mallory said she is 5-foot-11 1/2 — “6-foot with shoes on” — but was playing center and power forward on the high school team because she was bigger than her teammates.

There are not many 5-11 centers playing major college basketball.

“I wish she was two inches taller and just a hair quicker,” said Henderson, who as the pastor at First Christian Church in Newport actually baptized Mallory.

With plenty of taller players available, Dunton and, now, Oak Hill coach Mike Rodgers don’t have to wish. On their teams, Mallory can play small forward or guard, and do it against some of the best players in the country, both in games and in practice.

“A lot of people say they want to be pushed,” Rodgers said. “Mal means it.”

Mallory said she has always been athletic, which is no surprise. Chuck Jones played football at Pittsburgh and in the NFL, and has coached at the college and professional levels.

Mallory’s grandfather, the late Bill “Moose” Matthews, was a star basketball player at Virginia Tech, where he later became a coach and administrator.

But Mallory said it was another family tie that first brought her to basketball.

“My brother Morgan,” Mallory said. “I’ve always looked up to him. I wanted to do everything he did.”

When Morgan, two years older, went to play basketball, Mallory tagged along.

“My dad said I went to a basketball camp up at [Virginia] Tech when I was like five,” Mallory said. “I wasn’t supposed to be there — I was too young. — but they let me stay because I could shoot.”

She still can.

“When I watched those [AAU] girls this summer, there were a handful of people maybe that were better shooters,” Henderson said. “When she’s on a roll, there’s not a better shooter in the country. At least I didn’t see one.”

It was while she was playing against Oak Hill as a freshman that Mallory first caught Rodgers’ eye.

“I kept seeing this kid leading this team, scoring in bunches and kind of carrying this team,” Rodgers said. “It was her leadership, her competitiveness, her toughness.

“Obviously we have a lot of talent on our team and that didn’t phase her at all.”

Rodgers offered Mallory a full scholarship last summer, and she took it.

“I’m having a lot of fun so far,” Mallory said. “It’s weird, we all fit together so well. It’s like a family. We don’t really have any conflicting personalities.”

Henderson said he understands Mallory’s reasons for leaving Blacksburg, but said “it hurts us tremendously.” Mallory averaged 15.6 points and 7.1 rebounds for the Bruins last season, earning the Region IV Player of the Year title.

“It hurts the other girls,” Henderson said. “They have dreams, too.”

Henderson called on the Virginia High School League to look at its rules that restrict public schools from practicing as much as a potential big-time player might want.

“Until the VHSL does something … we can’t serve our girls,” Henderson said. “They’re going to force kids to go outside of high school.”

A former public school coach himself, Rodgers said he is keenly aware of the advantages he has coaching at Oak Hill. Unrestricted by VHSL rules, Rodgers’ team practices nine months a year. Practices are two hours a day, and Mallory said the girls all also take a one-hour daily weight-lifting class. They also have 312 hours of study hall and “quiet time.”

None of the students at Oak Hill are allowed to carry cellphones. Mallory said the team joke was that when they left campus for a road trip “everybody runs for their phones and iPods.”

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a service that works here,” Rodgers said with a laugh. “I have a captive audience. I’m not competing with cars or part-time jobs. I’m able to get the kids in the weight room the full year. I’m not competing with softball or volleyball.”

Still, Rodgers said he doesn’t think going away to boarding school is the only way for a player of Mallory’s talent and ambition to achieve the goal of playing high-level college basketball.

“If there’s a will, there’s a way,” Rodgers said. “Our school is a good way to specifically prepare for college. As far as skill development [though], there are a lot of ways to the prize.”

Take AAU. Rodgers said Mallory’s ball-handling skills have “improved dramatically” over the past two years, and Henderson credited Dunton.

“When she was a freshman, she relied a lot on being able to purely out-muscle people,” Henderson said. “She’s hard-headed and determined, but she listened to him. He shaped her game.”

Mallory agreed.

“Coach Dunton was showing me all of the things I needed to know,” she said. “He’s a really good coach.”

Mallory and Henderson cheerfully agreed that Dunton can be pretty tough.

“I was very, very hard on Mallory,” Dunton said. “Like if I didn’t think she was rebounding. And I didn’t get her mother saying, ‘Oh, you’re picking on my daughter.’ It is really, really big to have a parent reinforcing you. Pain is part of the process, frustration is part of the process.”

That the Jones family chose to add Oak Hill to Mallory’s AAU experience came down to those answers she offered to her dad.

“Our job as parents is to put her in the best position possible to achieve what she wants to achieve,” Chuck Jones said. “If she wasn’t capable, I would be honest enough to tell her.”