Published: January 05, 2006 11:50 pm         

Prep Profile: South’s Jay Smith drawing on father’s experience

Although he has some impressive basketball bloodlines of his own to draw on, Terre Haute South’s Jay Smith is compared to a completely unrelated player by his coach.

“To me, he’s the closest thing to a Reggie Miller-type of shooter I’ve seen,” said Mike Saylor of his senior guard, who scored a career-high 30 points in helping his high school team to third place in the Pizza Hut Wabash Valley Classic last week, earning all-tournament team honors in the process. “He can catch it and shoot it quickly.”

Being compared to Miller — or any other long-range shooter — might seem surprising to Wabash Valley basketball fans who remember Smith’s father from a two-year career at Indiana State. James Smith, a 6-foot-8 power forward, came to ISU as a rebounding and defensive specialist good enough to earn junior college All-America honors at Allegany (Md.), although he did — somewhat reluctantly, it appeared — lead ISU in scoring as a senior in the 1982-83 campaign.

Defense is not Jay’s forte yet, and he’s built more like the slender Miller than his father — although he rebounded fiercely at times during the Classic, even leading his team in that category in one game. So the conversations at home are somewhat predictable.

“[My father] is always talking about my defense and my rebounding,” Jay said this week. “He always says defense brings offense, and that [college] coaches are always looking at guards who can rebound.”

“A long-armed, athletic guard like he is can help us [on the boards],” Saylor agreed this week. “He’s got extraordinary ability as a shooter, and his best basketball is ahead of him as his body matures.

“As he works harder to get a college body, that would help him in a lot of areas of the game. He’s an excellent student, has a great attitude and comes from a good basketball background — and if he’d inherited his dad’s height, we would literally have a Reggie Miller.”

One thing father and son definitely have in common is their on-court demeanor, which ranges from deadly serious to full glower. Appearances can be deceiving, however; Jay Smith indicated this week he is far from an unhappy player — and that he understood the process last year when he saw limited varsity action with the Braves’ team that reached the Class 4A Final Four.

“We had a real good team last year,” he said, “so I can kind of understand taking a back seat. I knew this season would come, and I’d get plenty of time to help the team.”

And now, with the Braves having won four of five games since an 0-5 start, Jay is ready for both he and the Braves to take additional strides as they travel to Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference foe Warren Central tonight and to Bedford North Lawrence on Saturday.

“I feel like we weren’t together long enough to have chemistry at the beginning [of the season],” he said, “but now we’re starting to get it.

“We’re just now scraping our talent level. We’ll be a hard team to reckon with at tournament time.”

Jay Smith will likely be a shooter other coaches will have to prepare for at that time too.

“I’ve been shooting pretty good so far,” he said this week. “I’m just here to help the team.”

Even James Smith has been somewhat converted to a shooter’s mentality, his son added.

“He also tells me, ‘You shoot to get hot, and you shoot to stay hot,’ ” Jay said.