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Jabari Trotter: Full Speed Ahead
12/18/2009 11:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Like a lot of kids who grow up pounding basketballs in the Los Angeles area, Jabari Trotter found himself dreaming that one day he would be a starting point guard in the Pac-10.
Unlike so many others, he had reason to believe it might actually happen.
As a 5-foot-9 freshman at Polytechnic High School in Pasadena, Trotter averaged about 20 points per game. He was written up in the Los Angeles Times, earned a spot on the all-state freshman team and really did make it onto major college radar screens in the Golden State.
Flash forward and today the 6-1 Jabari Trotter is a starting point guard not at UCLA, USC or Stanford, but at Dartmouth College. Rather than playing for the Bruins, the Trojans or the Cardinal, he is a member of the Big Green. And no one will be confusing Ivy League basketball with the Pac-10 anytime soon.
But don't think for a second this is a story of a young man's dreams cruelly dashed, because it isn't. Trotter's dream is to one day be a basketball coach/slash mentor and nothing that has happened to him since his heady first year of high school basketball has diminished the chances of that coming about. In fact, a case can be made that the twists and turns in his 3,000-mile journey actually helped it.
The first twist came after his ninth-grade season when he decided to transfer from Polytechnic School. “I had gone to Pangos All-American Camp after my freshman year and I was humbled a little bit,” Trotter explained. “I still made the Top-50 all-star game, but I realized if I wanted to get better, if I wanted to play Division I basketball, I had to step up my competition. I knew I had to play against better guys.”
Trotter ended up at Harvard-Westlake School, which sent the Collins twins to Stanford and Bryce Taylor (son of former Princeton great Brian Taylor) to Oregon. At the North Hollywood school he would team up with players like Alex Stepheson, a 6-foot-9 Parade Magazine All-American who played two years at North Carolina before transferring to USC, 6-7 Jon Jaques, who plays at Cornell, and 6-5 Kieran Ramsey, who plays for Southern Connecticut. A year behind him was 6-8 Renaldo Woolridge, now at Tennessee.
The decision to switch schools was basketball-related, but this son of two educators had to make no apologies on the academic front. “Pasadena Poly and Harvard-Westlake academics were pretty much on the same level,” he said. “They are two of the maybe the three best institutions in Southern California.”
Prohibited from playing varsity as a sophomore year because of the transfer, Trotter got in a few games with the jayvees that winter before being sidelined by plantar fasciitis. As a junior he averaged 8.1 points and a team-high 5.7 assists as he helped the Wolverines to a 27-6 record although, toward the end of that year, there was another turn in his story.
“I partially tore my ACL in our first playoff game,” Trotter said. “I came back a little too early, three weeks later, to play in the CIF championship game, which we lost by one.”
Told the injury would not require surgery, Trotter took it easy for a couple of months before returning to the court. As a senior he averaged 15.2 points and 4.6 rebounds for a 22-6 team, but the knee still wasn't right and the Pac-10 schools that once seemed his destiny backed off.
“Even though I had the knee problems I was still getting looks from Loyola-Marymount, UCSB, Pacific,” he said. “I talked to the Gonzaga coach. A lot of West Coast schools. USD, San Diego State.”
With the academic reputation of Harvard-Westlake, it's no surprise that a select group of schools from 3,000 or so miles away were interested in Trotter as well. Intrigued by the idea of going Ivy, he thought at one point he would be headed to Brown. But with the knee still not completely right, another twist. He gave himself an extra year for it to come around by taking the suggestion of a Penn recruiter and opting for a postgraduate year at Phillips Exeter.
Playing under former Dartmouth assistant Jay Tilton, Trotter thrived at Exeter, where he was named team MVP. But even though he felt the knee was 100 percent for the first time since his junior year of high school, the interest of Ivy League schools was sporadic.
“Pretty much every Ivy League school was in the mix and they fell off,” he said. “Dartmouth was the only one that kept checking in on me, and seeing how I was doing. That kind of loyalty definitely played into my ending up here.”
Coach Terry Dunn made no secret of his plans while recruiting the Californian.
“When I talked to Coach Dunn, he sat down with my family and told us he was going to throw me out there immediately,” Trotter said. “He was going to let the wolves get me and see how I would react. I knew it was coming, but regardless of how well prepared you are, you are still going to get nervous. But as I played more and more with the guys, the leadership on the team kind of reaffirmed that I belonged.”
Trotter tallied 15 points and grabbed four rebounds playing a team-high 32 points in his first collegiate game against Army last winter and followed up with 19 points, five assists and four rebounds against Providence of the Big East the next time out. He went on to join senior Alex Barnett, the Ivy League player of the year, as the only Big Green player to start all 28 games. He finished second on the team in scoring, assists and minutes played.
Trotter has started every game again this fall and is the team's clear leader on the court, which has been no surprise to Dunn.
“Jabari took on a leadership role even as a freshman,” he said. “It's tough for a young player when you have upperclassmen, but more so this year. Because we don't have a lot of upperclassmen his role becomes even larger.
“He's played a lot of minutes. We're asking him sometimes to defend the best player on the floor, and we are asking him to run our offense. So his plate is full.”
That's just fine with Jabari, who is looking forward to spending time on the bench — but only after he's done playing.
“I definitely want to coach,” he said. “Every time I watch basketball on TV or watch another game I'm always trying to see what they do on the court, but also wondering what the coach is thinking in certain situations. What is he doing? Then I kind of play in my head, what would I do in that scenario?”
As a point guard, he always brought that mindset to games, but it became even more prominent after he hurt his knee.
“There was physical things that I can't do that I used to be able to do,” he said. “I'm not as quick as I used to be because of the knee. I can't jump as high as I used to because of the knee and the feet. It makes me have to think the game. I have to think 3-4-5 steps ahead.”
Which is exactly what he's doing now when it comes to his future.
“Ideally I'd have a chance to play basketball for a couple of years and then go into coaching,” he said. “If it's not coaching I see myself in some kind of leadership or mentorship role. I'd like to coach in college but I could see myself as a high school teacher and coach. Somehow I want to give back. I think there's a lot that I can share.”
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