Cedric’s a Secret No More : College basketball: After toiling in relative obscurity, Cal State Fullerton’s Ceballos receives rave reviews and prepares to be selected high in the NBA draft.

There is a certain charm in a person who doesn’t yet know how good he is. Cedric Ceballos, still half amazed at the player he has become, oozes with it.

When Ceballos slashes to the baseline for a dunk, the crowd in Titan Gym cheers him, some of them by bowing up and down in a worshipful pose.

When Ceballos watches Michael Jordan dunk on television, he gets even more excited, once throwing himself so forcefully to the floor of a living room crowded with teammates that he scared the daylights out of a family cat.

Sports Illustrated wrote a short story on Cal State Fullerton’s Ceballos recently, calling him one of the five best players in the country who are rarely seen on television. When Ceballos heard the magazine was out, he was sitting in a hotel room in Northern California at 1:30 a.m. Unable to wait till morning, he slipped out to a 7-Eleven to get a copy.

“I must have bought 10 copies of that and dished them out,” he said.

Ceballos--the middle syllable is pronounced ball as in basket--is a 6-foot-7, wire-thin, 195-pound senior who has become everybody’s unknown all-American this season. He has been called a best-kept secret so many times that he probably no longer qualifies.

The skinny kid who didn’t even start for Dominguez High School until Ronnie Coleman broke his wrist now draws Jerry West to Titan Gym to scout him. The late-bloomer who used to lag behind his classmates now waits to be drafted by an NBA team, possibly in the first round.

Yet for all the attention, Ceballos’ assessment of his own play is still mixed more with wonder than conceit.

Asked after one of his more spectacular performances this season how he thought he had played, Ceballos paused for a moment.

“I’m playing great,” he said.

He wasn’t bragging, just allowing for fact.

Ceballos, a small forward with a hunger for offensive rebounds, the sweetest of touches around the glass and an ability to run the floor with ferocity, quickly attracted a collection of admirers around the Big West Conference last season, his first at Fullerton.

The coaches voted Stacey Augmon of Nevada Las Vegas as the player of the year. The players who were polled by the Long Beach Press-Telegram chose Ceballos.

One of the coaches who most admires Ceballos is Jerry Tarkanian, who has said that if the Rebels had Ceballos on the team that made the final eight last season, they might have won the national championship.

Tarkanian saw Ceballos in one of his best games last season, when UNLV and Fullerton played in the conference tournament. Ceballos was being guarded by Augmon, who made the 1988 U.S. Olympic team for his defensive skills. But Ceballos was getting the better of him in the first half, blowing by him on the baseline and wiggling free inside for offensive rebounds.

At one point, as Ceballos took the ball out near the UNLV bench, Tarkanian spoke to him.

Ceballos broke into a grin.

“Stop it, you’re killing us,” Tarkanian had told him.

UNLV won the game, but afterward, Tarkanian stopped Ceballos in the hall.

“How many did you get?” he asked.

“Thirty-one,” Ceballos said.

“Good,” Tarkanian said. “We held you.”

Ceballos was named first-team all-Big West Conference after leading the conference in scoring last season, averaging 21.2 points a game, and finishing second in rebounding, averaging 8.8, to Eric McArthur of UC Santa Barbara.

But the remarkable thing is that despite all he accomplished last season, he would be a candidate for most improved this season, if such an award were given. He is likely to finish behind UNLV’s Larry Johnson in voting for player of the year.

A year ago, Ceballos was a sometimes balky 19-year-old playing his first season of major-college basketball after playing at Ventura College for two seasons.

By his own admission, he tried to do everything.

“I used to try to have something to do every play,” Ceballos said. “But you can’t be there every play.”

Ceballos’ shot selection was an issue last season with Fullerton Coach John Sneed, who wanted him to make better decisions.

Ceballos took more than 20 shots in a game 12 times last season. After he took 31 shots in one game, some of his teammates complained. Ceballos responded the next game by scoring two points, going one for 12, and saying he could not play well when he felt his teammates were unhappy with him.

Another time, Ceballos sat out most of the second half of a close game because he refused Sneed’s demand that he take off a sweatband marked with the name and number of suspended teammate Marlon Vaughn. Ceballos finally relented, just in time to help Fullerton hold on for a victory.

This season, Ceballos is more mature, and his shot selection much improved.

“His percentage and shot selection have been outstanding,” Sneed said. “He has looked at a lot of tapes and evaluated himself on what’s a good shot and what’s a bad shot, decision-making on the court.”

He is shooting less, but scoring more. His average has crept up to 22.4.

When the season ends, he will have passed Leon Wood as the school’s career leading scorer by average, breaking Wood’s mark of 20.6 over three seasons.

After shooting 44% from the field last season, Ceballos is making almost 50% this season. After making 28% from three-point range last season, he is making almost one of every three, 26 of 81.

“I’m just trying to do as much as I can now, not make every play spectacular,” Ceballos said.

He also has improved his already excellent rebounding, probably in part because he has played power forward at times this season, placing him closer to the basket.

His rebounding average is up more than three a game, from 8.8 to 12.2. Most impressive, though, is his offensive rebounding. He averages five a game.

Jerry Pimm, UC Santa Barbara’s coach, saw Ceballos play one of the his finest games, a superbly controlled 33-point, 17-rebound performance last month in a game the Gauchos won in overtime.

“He had six offensive rebounds, and scored on five of them,” Pimm said. “He was too good for us that night. They’d screen for him, or he’d duck underneath. We tried two or three different people on him. He’s much better than he was last year.”

Pimm saw Ceballos again a couple of weeks later. That time, Ceballos scored 27 points and had 21 rebounds.

“Amazing,” Pimm said.

Ceballos has played some of his best games in the past month, but he did struggle some earlier in the season, particularly in the first half of games.

At one time, he was averaging eight points a game in first halves, and 18 in second halves.

Ceballos said that was a result of putting too much pressure on himself. Despite Ceballos’ improvement, the season has been a disappointment for Fullerton, which had four starters back from the team that went 16-13 last year. This season, the Titans are 12-13.

Ceballos has carried his share of the load, playing every minute of seven games, including every minute of three overtime games.

“How many times can he carry us?” Sneed asks wearily, knowing that too much has been required of Ceballos.

Of late, Ceballos has even taken to leading the fast break, taking the rebound off the glass and turning to push the ball toward the Titans’ basket, with guards Wayne Williams and Mark Hill filling the lanes. Unlike a year ago, he is as likely to pass the ball as he is to shoot it.

The season is all but over now, with only this afternoon’s game against UC Irvine at the Bren Center and a game against UNLV in Titan Gym next Saturday remaining in the regular season. After that, the Titans will play in the Big West Conference tournament, and the season will end with their next loss.

Ceballos will turn his attention to the NBA draft, which, after all, has been the impetus for some of his great improvement.

After last season, he was a possibility. Now he is a prospect.

His abilities are obvious. The concerns some scouts have about him center on his slight build, or on his ability to play on the perimeter, particularly defensively.

West, the Lakers’ general manager, has scouted Ceballos at least twice this season.

“The obvious thing about him is he plays so darn hard and puts up the numbers,” West said. “That’s intriguing. He’s also a young kid (20) who looks like an unselfish player.”

Marty Blake, a scouting consultant to the NBA, agrees with West that Ceballos could be drafted late in the first round or early in the second.

“He can run the court and he’s very active,” Blake said. “I’m very impressed.”

That is precisely what Ceballos wanted.

“I feel I’ve eliminated all the doubts from last year,” Ceballos said. “They evaluated me, and they were unsure if I was a team player last year. By my passing this year, I’ve tried to show I am. I’ve improved my three-point shot real well. They wanted to see if I defended better. I’ve picked up on my steals.”

If Ceballos has his way, the time will come when he’s not a secret at all.

“They’re just getting to know me,” he said.