A FIRST-RATE FIRST CLASS : Understudies No Longer, Kids Are Taking the Lead

Remember when college freshmen used to shag towels for the varsity and speak when spoken to?

Now, they’re being asked to lead national championship charges.

Look around. Georgia Tech guard Stephon Marbury scored 23 second-half points Jan. 7, leading the Yellow Jackets to an 86-81 victory at Duke.

“One of the best halves I’ve seen at Cameron [Indoor Stadium], against us, in my 16 years,” Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski said of Marbury’s performance.

North Carolina Coach Dean Smith, a dean from the old school, is starting two freshmen--Vince Carter and Antawn Jamison--and getting significant minutes from another, Ademola Okulaja.

Yet, the Tar Heels remain a national force. And Clemson won its first 11 games starting three freshmen.

It’s a fact: freshmen are dominating the college stage. The standouts are Shareef Abdur-Rahim at California, Paul Pierce at Kansas, Jelani McCoy at UCLA, Damion Walker at Texas Christian, Louis Bullock and Robert Traylor at Michigan, Chauncey Billups at Colorado and Ron Mercer at Kentucky.

McCoy has already blocked 11 shots in a game, Billups has already recorded Colorado’s first triple-double and Cal’s Abdur-Rahim already leads the Pacific 10 Conference in scoring.

Why the sudden impact?

Coaches cite two factors:

--Freshmen are better than they used to be. Players are developed and scouted at an earlier age and are battle-tested after the barrage of summer leagues and all-star tournaments.

“They have better training,” said Kansas Coach Roy Williams, who plucked Pierce from Inglewood High. “They’re not wide-eyed and bushy-tailed. They’re much more worldly to the pressures and attention of big-time college basketball.”

--With star players leaving early for the NBA, freshmen are getting more opportunities.

“They’re stepping into big voids, big shoes, and taking advantage of it,” Georgia Tech Coach Bobby Cremins said.

Once, Dean Smith would rather have run naked across the Duke campus than start freshmen. In 1987, Smith turned to rookies Rick Fox and Pete Chilcutt in the Tip-Off Classic, but only because J.R. Reid and Steve Bucknall were serving suspensions for an off-season fight.

This season, Smith had little choice after his two stars, Rasheed Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse, left for the NBA after their sophomore seasons.

Smith had recruited Jamison, Carter and Okulaja “thinking we still had Stackhouse and Wallace returning.”

Other factors:

--Smith cites a change in NCAA rules that allows coaches to meet with freshmen twice weekly for 5O-minute sessions of instruction when they arrive on campus.

--Williams of Kansas thinks the increasing pace of the college game has put a premium on recruiting athletes who can play right away.

“Being athletic is extremely important,” Williams said. “You either have it or you don’t have it.”

--Duke’s Krzyzewski says freshmen are having more success because they are competing against fewer quality upperclassmen.

“It’s not like they’re coming in and playing on a lot of teams that have juniors and seniors,” Krzyzewski said. “That’s the changing face of college basketball right now.”

There is a down side. Felipe Lopez, the former freshman phenom who came billed as the the savior of the program at St. John’s, is now a struggling sophomore.

Kentucky Coach Rick Pitino prefers to break freshmen in slowly. Mercer, for example, is averaging only 22 minutes a game.

“The tough year is the following season,” Pitino said. “[Sophomore] expectations are really high. Ron Mercer will be allowed to grow in the normal fashion.”

But what about freshmen who develop so fast they never become juniors?

There is already talk that Marbury, Georgia Tech’s whiz kid, will leave for the NBA after one season. He already has an entourage and cult following.

If Marbury goes, however, rest assured that there is a high school senior out there ready to replace him.

We just don’t know his name yet.

TRAVELGATE

Final boarding call for the University of Arizona Wildcats.

Phil Martelli, first-year St. Joseph’s coach, is seething over Arizona’s decision to skip out on last Saturday’s game in Philadelphia.

Citing bad weather in the East, the Wildcats refused to board their plane Friday morning.

The flight, connecting through Chicago, landed on time in Philadelphia on Friday evening.

The weather in Philadelphia over the weekend?

Sunny and clear.

It was the Wildcats, Martelli contends, who had the cold feet.

The coach is convinced that Arizona bailed out because St. Joseph’s had taken No. 1 Massachusetts to overtime before losing earlier in the week.

“If we had lost by 15, 20, 25 points to UMass, they would have mini-vanned to Philadelphia,” Martelli said. “But it became a dangerous game, in a tough setting, with some difficulty in traveling. That’s clearly the reason they didn’t come, and no one will ever change my mind otherwise.”

The game was ruled a cancellation, and neither school’s record was affected. St. Joseph’s, which beat Pennsylvania on Tuesday night in running its record to 6-5, had already postponed two games because of the weather.

To make a point, Martelli had his team show up Saturday at the Palestra and stage a mock game. It ended shortly after tipoff when Will Johnson made an, um, uncontested layup.

“Basically they thumbed their noses at us,” Martelli said. “I wanted to turn around and do the same to them.”

The controversy has spread to bitterness between the Pac-10 and Atlantic 10 conferences. Though there appears no avenue of recourse, an Atlantic 10 official says the conference backs St. Joseph’s gripe “1,000%.”

Temple Coach John Chaney was more blunt.

“If that was me, I would be on my way right now to Arizona to kick somebody’s [butt],” he said.

Martelli won’t want to hear this, but on Saturday, the day Arizona Coach Lute Olson was supposed to be in Philadelphia, he was reportedly in Orange County, watching a high school star, Villa Park’s Eric Chenowith.

Martelli said the lost game, which was to have been televised on ESPN2, cost his young program valuable exposure. He was more outraged that Olson referred to the game as “insignificant” in Tucson papers.

“He has the audacity and arrogance to call the game insignificant?” Martelli asked.

What about phones?

“Just man to man, for that coach not to call here, we have a problem,” Martelli said. “He has yet to call here. I called his office Friday. His secretary said he was unavailable. I said, ‘Where is he, out digging snow?’

“She laughed. I said, ‘This isn’t funny.’ ”

Martelli retracted earlier remarks that he would refuse to play Arizona if the teams ever met in the NCAA tournament.

“I might play that game,” he said. “But I have no interest in ever dealing with them again.”

Arizona’s side of the story?

An Arizona spokesman said the decision to cancel was a judgment call and said that the school had received calls from some players’ parents, asking that the trip be canceled.

As for Arizona ever playing St. Joseph’s in the NCAA tournament. . . .

“I hope the hell we get slotted against him first round NCAA tourney,” the Arizona official said. “Because it means we’ll be going to the second round.”

LOOSE ENDS

Wake Forest Coach Dave Odom was quoted last week as saying that North Carolina’s Smith was the greatest college basketball coach of all time. “I don’t think there is any qualification,” Odom told the Sporting News. “They can talk about all the others, but he is the best coach to coach the game.”

Comment: The night Smith wins his 11th national championship--he has won two--he may be fitted for the best-ever crown. Until then, former UCLA Coach John Wooden is king.

Perhaps Odom forgot that little UCLA stretch of 10 national titles in 12 years back in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Key injuries have weakened what promised to be a competitive Pac-10 race. Stanford, 8-4 overall and 2-2 in the conference, has struggled without 7-foot-1 center Tim Young, out indefinitely because of a bulging disk in his back. Young, a sophomore, may not return this season. He looses his redshirt opportunity if he plays in another game and the Cardinal won’t take that risk unless Young is 100%.

Kevin Eastman’s Washington State team (8-4, 1-3) has not been a factor without star forward Mark Hendrickson, out because of a broken left hand, his shooting hand, suffered Dec. 27. Hendrickson, from Mount Vernon, Wash., will not play Sunday against Washington and is wait-and-see for the next week against Stanford and Cal.

Utah Coach Rick Majerus drove from Salt Lake City to Monday’s game at San Diego State because of an inner-ear infection and acknowledged that the trip took longer than expected. “It takes a long time when I stop to eat,” he said.

Clemson Coach Rick Barnes and North Carolina’s Smith tried to be on their best behavior Sunday in their first encounter since their jaw-to-jaw in last year’s ACC tournament. Even so, things got a bit testy at the Dean Dome. After Smith’s Tar Heels had whacked the Tigers, 86-53, Barnes complained that his name had not been announced during pregame introductions.

Notre Dame has opened its first season in conference play with six consecutive defeats in the Big East.

Duke’s Krzyzewski on his team’s 0-4 start in the ACC: “We’re not a program of excuses. This is where we’re at. You have to earn winning.”