Running Laguna Beach’s Offense Is a Science to Gravley : Basketball: The 5-10 point guard has become the Artists’ low-key leader. He also excels in advanced classes.

Darren Gravley is a student of science, but he doesn’t need an advanced placement physics class to explain his limitations as a 5-foot-10 point guard.

Just ask him to dunk.

“OK, I can’t dunk yet,” said Gravley, the leading scorer on the Laguna Beach High School boys’ basketball team. “But I can if I mix my sports. I can dunk a volleyball. My hands aren’t big enough to palm a basketball.”

Physical limitations aside, Gravley can do just about anything asked of him when he plays basketball.

A self-described gym rat, he’s averaging 18.3 points per game and is the key to the Artists’ full-court press. He’s an effective passer, averaging 5.3 assists.

And he’s deadly from three-point range, shooting 43.8% and hitting as many as seven in a game. He has career-high games of 33 points (last season against San Clemente) and 30 (this season against Saddleback).

Gravley has become a low-key leader, quietly scoring and running the offense of the shortest teams in Orange County. The Artists (12-7, 2-3 in league) don’t have a starter taller than 6-4.

“Darren’s very unassuming,” said Gene Gravley, his father. “You look at the (Laguna Beach) basketball program and poster, and you’ll always find him in the back row of the team picture. You can barely see him.

“But that’s the way he likes it. He doesn’t want to stand out.”

But he does, whether he likes it or not. His academic, as well as athletic, performance often lands him in the foreground.

He has a 4.4 grade-point average and has taken advanced-placement courses in physics, chemistry and Spanish. He’s in his second year of calculus, is president of the school’s National Honor Society and is already enrolled in a college geology course.

And you won’t meet many 18-year-olds with Gravley’s perspective. As an eighth-grader, he attended an all-boys school in New Zealand for 10 months, along with friend Matt Appel.

“I wasn’t used to going to a formal school like they have there,” Gravley said. “We had to wear uniforms--shorts and socks to our knees--even when it was sub-zero weather. They wouldn’t even let us wear jackets.”

A trip to the Grand Canyon that same year influenced Gravley’s career decision. He went with Saddleback College professor Pete Borella, who took his family and several students to Arizona to study land forms. Gravley is good friends with Josh Borella, Pete’s son and Gravley’s former Laguna Beach teammate.

Studying the different sediments and varying layers of earth intrigued Gravley, so much so that he wants to teach geology or enter survey engineering. He’s taking a geology course, “Evolutions of Land Forms” twice a week at UC Irvine.

“I want to study the evolution of anything that exists,” Gravley said. “We’re here only 80 or 90 years, but everything around has been here for billions of years. It’s the ancientness of everything that interests me.”

Gravley is looking at colleges as much for their geology programs as their athletics. He has applied to Brown and Cornell, and is considering several other schools, including Colorado College, Purdue and Cal Poly Pomona.

“I’d love to play college basketball,” he said. “But I want a good education.”

Sports have been a part of everyday life since Gravley was old enough to toddle. His parents run a community youth tennis and projects program in Laguna Beach.

His father, Gene, is the activities director at the Emerald Bay Community Assn., and mother, Sandy, is an elementary teacher at Top of the World.

Like most kids, Gravley dabbled in several sports. He was swinging a tennis racket at age 3, shagging ground balls at 5, and was a terror in the youth soccer leagues and local track meets.

By the time he reached junior high, he was playing pickup basketball and volleyball at the local boys’ club. He played cricket during his stay in New Zealand.

But basketball began taking up more of his time. By his freshman year, he played basketball and volleyball exclusively.

Gravley lettered in basketball as a sophomore, joining the varsity near the end of the season in which the Artists reached the section finals.

After his sophomore season, he began working out with personal skills coach Tom Marumoto at the Eastbluff Boys’ Club in Corona del Mar. Marumoto has developed several of the top players in the area, including former Loyola Marymount guard Jeff Fryer and Duke’s Cherokee Parks.

“Tom worked with me a lot on my ballhandling skills,” Gravley said. “I still need to make some better decisions when I play.”

Gravley also gets instruction from Appel’s father, Chris, a standout basketball player at USC in the late 1950s.

“Chris has helped teach Darren the science of basketball,” Gene Gravley said. “He has worked with him on positioning and working within an offense.”

Gravley is passing those skills along through his parents’ youth programs, where he works as a counselor.

He and Woodbridge’s Todd Loewe also spend three or four hours a week teaching skills to some of Marumoto’s younger students.

“Tom helped me change my whole game,” Gravley said. “I get a lot out of teaching for him too. I like working with the kids.”

Just so long as they don’t ask for dunking tips.