Brea’s Williams Makes Rapid Rise to the Top

Three years ago, Jinelle Williams was a scared eighth-grader riding the pine for the Pole Cats, an elite developmental girls’ basketball team.

Williams had played virtually no organized basketball. She was only on the bench because Brea-Olinda High School Coach Mark Trakh had seen her in his junior high physical education class and recognized her athletic talent. He suggested that she play for the Pole Cats, a junior high team coached by history teacher Jon Joslin.

Not that she actually was playing.

“I didn’t want to play then,” said Williams, who is now a junior and the leading scorer for Brea-Olinda, the defending Division III state champions.

“I would be sitting on the bench watching the clock move and hoping time would run out so I wouldn’t have to go in.”

Williams didn’t want to play, because she didn’t know how to play. To Williams, a stutter step could have meant a shoe with a twisted tongue. A travel? Isn’t that something you do on vacation? A zone? Uh, you mean like the ozone layer or the Twilight Zone?

“I didn’t know at all what I was doing,” Williams said. “I didn’t know anything. One thing I’ll always remember was three seconds. You know how you can’t stay in the key? I thought it was on both offense and defense so I was jumping out of the key on defense.”

Fortunately for Williams, she is a quick study.

In her freshman year, she made an impression, starting on a junior varsity team that won 24 games and lost only to Mission Viejo’s varsity team, which was ranked second in the county at the time.

Last season, Williams made her mark. In her first season on the varsity, all she did was score 23 points in the Southern California Regional championship victory over Lemoore and 24 points in the state championship victory over Mercy. She also was a second-team all-state Division III selection.

This season, Williams again is an impact player for top-ranked Brea. Two weeks ago she was named the most valuable player in the 16-team Irvine tournament that featured some of the county’s top teams and players.

“When she was voted MVP of the Irvine tournament, she got a huge hand (of applause),” Trakh said. “She is like a crowd favorite. People in Brea just love her.” Williams also is the Wildcats’ leading scorer, averaging 14 points a game. Quite an accomplishment considering she plays on an experienced team that includes senior point guard Aimee McDaniel, the state player of the year last year, and senior Tammy Blackburn, another guard who has signed to play at San Diego State in the fall.

Williams gets more opportunities to score because guards McDaniel and Blackburn try to feed her the ball. Nothing unusual there, because Williams is the team’s center. What is unusual is that she can dominate as much as she does with her limited experience--and her limited height. She is only 5-feet-8 1/2.

“She is just a great athlete,” Trakh said. “We almost saw her touch the rim the other day. She can really jump. She plays like she’s 6 foot. She jumps over a lot of those kids and she is quick. She is a quick jumper. She is so fast she can beat a lot of those people down the court. She has to have an incredible time in the 40.”

Williams jumps well enough that her thoughts of dunking a basketball some day can’t quite be categorized as fantasy, at least not to her face.

“I am about an inch from (the rim),” she said. “My goal is to be able to dunk by my senior year. I want to score the winning basket on a dunk and break the backboard.

“My freshman year I could touch the rubber on the bottom of the backboard. Last year, I got up there a little bit more.”

Williams, who was once intimidated by the prospect of taking to the court for a few seconds, now loves the game so much that in the off-season she spends hours honing her game at Tamarack Park in Brea. That’s where she perfects the moves that help her dominate taller centers.

“Coach Trakh shows us a lot of moves for different situations,” Williams said. “We do them a lot as a warmup in practice and it just becomes routine. If you see that (situation), you just go ahead and do that move that he showed you.

“I think many times I can score because I don’t realize the (opposing centers) are there, and by the time I turn around, I am already up shooting so I don’t have time to be intimidated too much.”

Williams’ toughest test lies ahead in college where 5-8 centers usually get the best look at the brand name of the basketball--as it is stuffed back down their throats.

She is aware that she has to make the transition to play the wing in college. She doesn’t start at wing for Brea despite the fact that there are taller players who could play center.

“We are not going to be as strong a team if she plays outside,” Trakh said. “And who does she replace outside? Jody (Anton)?, Tammy? Those people are better outside shooters. It’s a balancing act. We have to look out for her future and, at the same time, we have to look out for the team, the high school and the rest of the kids, too. I think she has a better chance of getting a Division I-scholarship than if she did not play at all.”

Trakh has been working with Williams on her guard skills during the summer.

“She is a good enough athlete that she can teach herself,” Trakh said. “She has a good attitude and a super personality and she is intelligent. She picks up things very quickly.”

Williams is not too concerned with her impending transition to guard. “That seems like a long way away for me to think about,” she said. “It’s what, a year and a half away?”

Besides, she’s not only quick, she’s a quick study.