BASKETBALL NOTEBOOK : Franklin Stretches His Horizons to Big Sky

Nothing much can diminish the enthusiasm of Len Stevens, the new basketball coach at Nevada-Reno, who believes he has scored his first major success since leaving his job at Washington State in April. The source of Stevens’ zeal is Kevin Franklin, the Valley area’s leading scorer last season, who has made a verbal commitment to the school.

It doesn’t matter that Franklin has signed no letter of intent and is bound by no contract to attend Nevada-Reno this fall. Franklin committed after the May 15 letter-of-intent deadline. Stevens has submitted to the Big Sky Conference office a document called a tender of financial aid that binds the university to an offer of a full scholarship to Franklin. The 6-4 guard from Taft High is not bound by the agreement.

It also doesn’t seem to matter that Franklin can’t even play next season. He scored less than 700 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and will lose his first year of eligibility.

Still, Stevens is willing to overlook those shortcomings and focus on the long arms and deft shooting touch that earned Franklin All-City honors and a 31.6 scoring average last season.

“Anytime you come into a program late like we did and have someone of his caliber still around, it’s a very, very fortunate thing,” Stevens said this week. “I consider him among the top 75 to 100 players in the country. We’re extremely excited to start off the recruiting year with someone of his caliber.”

Stevens has ambitious plans for Nevada-Reno, which was 15-15 and 7-7 in the Big Sky Conference last season. Nevada-Reno boasts a 3-year-old, 12,000-seat arena and a schedule that includes games with Nevada-Las Vegas and North Carolina next season, and those two plus Kentucky the season after.

“A lot of things are developing here,” Stevens said. “We want to put ourselves at the level with the top 10 teams on the West Coast and the top 30 teams in the country. We felt we had to get a blue-chip player right away. We were very compatible with Kevin and it tied in perfectly.”

Franklin said he was impressed with Stevens and the schedule and liked the idea of leaving the area.

“I wanted to go away from home and meet different people and see what life was like,” he said. “My parents won’t be there every time I need them. I’ll be more independent.”

Perhaps, but he won’t be lonely. Kevin’s brother, Keith, who played basketball and football at Taft but no sports in college, is enrolled at Nevada-Reno.

Stevens is more interested in the younger Franklin at the moment.

“People say he’s a great shooter, I say he’s a great scorer,” he said. “He has the innate ability to put the ball in the basket. All great players are great because they do things that can’t be taught. He makes the game look easy; it’s a gift he has.”

Closing in on college: Simi Valley’s 6-10 center Don MacLean has narrowed his college choices to an even dozen. MacLean will be a senior in the fall and likely will be the Valley’s most sought-after player.

His shopping list reads like a Who’s Who of college basketball. In the West, the candidates are UCLA, Arizona, California, Pepperdine and Nevada-Las Vegas. Also in the running are Iowa, Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, Duke, Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Louisville.

MacLean completed his summer season in Friday night’s final of an amateur tournament in Las Vegas, playing for Mid Valley of the American Roundball Corp., which won the tournament for the fifth time in the past 10 years. MacLean, who missed the first two days of the tournament because of commitments with the Simi Valley team, played with an injured back after falling on his tail bone the previous week. The injury kept him out of Simi Valley’s final two summer league games this week.

What’s in a name?: Rich Goldberg, Mid Valley’s coach, often is kidded about his team’s name. The only player from the Valley to travel to Las Vegas was MacLean. Starters Chris Mills, Doug Meekins, James Moses, and Darrick Martin are from the Los Angeles area, and three other players are from out of state. Shawn Kemp, Chris Lawson and Sean Woods traveled from Indiana to play with the team in the tournament.

Said Goldberg: “I get this all the time. Mid Valley should be Mid World, right? Mid Valley has a national reputation. Many of the players met at the Nike camp in Princeton. In the future, we’ll try to stay with the California kids. Next year, we will start an ARC team in Indiana, and we’re looking toward Florida, Mississippi and Washington.”