Bone Has a Little of Everything Going Her Way : Girls’ basketball: El Toro’s 6-foot center, who has chosen to attend Dartmouth, brings great versatility to game.

This is the time of year when some athletically gifted high school basketball seniors make news because the 360 degrees in their turnaround jump shots are greater than the number of points they scored on their college entrance exams.

Not so for Sara Bone of El Toro High School. Bone, a starting forward for the South team in the 25th Orange County All-Star basketball game at 4 p.m. today at Cal State Fullerton, has the grades to go anywhere she wants.

Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown and Duke were just a handful of the schools that came courting. And why not?

Bone, 6-foot, 150 pounds, was selected class valedictorian and queen of El Toro’s winter formal. She led her South Coast League champion basketball team in scoring (18.1 points) and rebounding (10.4), and she scored 1,120 points on her Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Her versatility is all part of her life’s philosophy.

“I want to be a Renaissance woman,” Bone said. “I think all the women in the world who are accomplished in a lot of different areas, they are my heroes.

“That’s my goal. Not to be Phi Beta Kappa, but to be Phi Beta Kappa at Dartmouth, and win their 10th Ivy League championship in 12 years. I want to go out and meet a lot of people from different countries and states, make more friends, join a lot more clubs, make the most of that $20,000 a year.”

That’s what it will cost to attend Dartmouth, her school of choice; she won’t be receiving any financial aid because aid at that university is based on need. But Bone wouldn’t have it any other way. She could let athletics pay for her college education at many other schools, but that did not fit the Sara Bone philosophy.

For one thing, she didn’t want to be on one coast playing a game one day, and on the other coast a day later in the middle of the school year.

“If you’re paying someone to go to that school to play basketball, then basketball has to be the first priority,” she said. “I want to be able to study when I want. Plus, I want to have fun in college, and you need time to develop yourself academically and socially.”

Bone already appears well-lettered in sociability. A self-described lover of talk--”I really would love to be a lawyer because I just have to use my mouth”--Bone won over South Coach Rick Falk of Tustin High School and her teammates on the all-star squad.

“I’ve always been jealous of (El Toro Coach) Greg Yeck, and having Sara for a week and a half makes me even more so,” Falk said. “I said at the banquet, if this were a beauty contest, she would win Ms. Congeniality going away. She’s got everything on the ball, yet she doesn’t flaunt it.

“But her best asset is her leadership. We have 15 kids who are used to being leaders on their teams and Sara has kind of asserted herself and managed not to antagonize anybody in the process.”

It isn’t exactly easy to be just one of the girls with a 4.63 grade-point average in advanced courses, but Bone has managed. Many of her South teammates had no idea she was a class brain, she said. Not until she won the Kiwanis Club Academic Award at the all-star banquet, along with Cypress’ Stacey Kosaka (4.16) of the North team.

Karie Yoshioka, Bone’s 5-5 teammate at El Toro and also an all-star, likes having a smaller, quicker forward such as Bone for a teammate.

“She was our tallest player so she had to play center,” said Yoshioka, a point guard. “She was great for me. She is agile, so all I had to do was throw it up there and she would get it. And she ran the floor really well for a center.”

Bone strives not to be different, but to do her best, she said. “I don’t consider myself the smartest person in the class, but then again, I don’t think the most successful people in the world are the smartest people in the world. People who work hardest and do what they want to do are the most successful.”

What Bone loves to do is play basketball. “I would rather shoot hoops than study any time, but I know what my priorities should be,” she said.

Yeck says Bone is a “graceful, finesse player.” She played well all season against bigger centers such as Ocean View’s Jenny Sullivan and Mission Viejo’s Jennifer Rohrig.

She prevailed by going around or drifting away from players, not going through them. Bone credits Yeck and El Toro assistant Jim Irby for teaching her the moves to allow her to keep company in the paint with the county’s best.

“I would just fake left or head fake or ball fake, and players would take it every single time,” Bone said. “I did (the fakes) for four years and I was laughing my senior year because these girls couldn’t figure out I was going to do the same thing.”

All-Star Notes

The South leads the series, 8-3. This season’s North squad may be hard-pressed to stop the South’s two-game winning streak. The North has county scoring leader Amy Jalewalia (33 points per game), but doesn’t have the depth inside to match that of the South. The South has 6-3 Jennifer Rohrig of Mission Viejo, 6-0 Erin Schimeneck, of Dana Hills, 5-10 Nicole Champion of Orange and 6-0 Kim Kordik of Esperanza. Kordik has a hamstring injury and might not play.

“The kids hold Amy (Jalewalia) in awe,” South Coach Rick Falk said. “They just think she can score against anybody any time she feels like it. So there are two ways to go: Try to shut her down or let her do her thing and try to shut everyone else down, and probably that second one is what we are going to do.” If so, Jalewalia has a good shot at breaking the all-star game scoring record of 35 points set by Heather Estey of Corona del Mar in 1983.