NCAA WOMEN’S BASKETBALL : Joni Easterly Gives USC Drive With More Than Her Statistics

There goes Joni Hustle again.

Look at her run, getting back on defense . . . Loose ball . . . . She’s after it . . . Splat! She’s sliding on the floor . . . she swats the ball back in play just as she crashes headfirst into the seats . Bam!

The ball is picked up by Nicky McCrimmon, who feeds Lisa Leslie, who scores from under the basket .

Joni Hustle is slowly getting to her feet. She briefly inspects the floor burns on her legs and the lump on her head. The trainer arrives.

“I’m OK,” Joni Hustle says.

She always says that. She’s always OK.

USC wins.

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Nobody really calls her Joni Hustle.

Her name is Joni Easterly. To her teammates, she’s “Jones.”

Many who have watched Pacific 10 women’s basketball this season call her the conference’s best all-around player.

Easterly, a 5-foot-11 point guard/off guard/center/shooting forward/power forward on the USC team that plays Nebraska on Sunday at 3 at the Sports Arena in the NCAA tournament, presents five problems for Nebraska Coach Angela Beck.

In several games this season, Easterly has played every position.

She’s the kind of player for whom you don’t necessarily need a stat sheet to review her game.

“Even if I hadn’t been at the game, I could take a look at her after a game and tell you what kind of game she’d played,” said Marianne Stanley, USC’s coach.

“I’d just count all her floor burns and bruises.”

That’s Easterly, a senior from Anaheim Katella High who takes 15.2 and 6.2 scoring and rebounding averages, 3.1 assists per game and 1.9 steals into the NCAA playoffs. She not only plays technically at a high level, but also supplements her versatile game with an even higher intensity.

Before this season, each Trojan player was asked to fill out a form for the publicity department. Two of the questions:

A. Who is the most intense player on the team?

B. Who is the player I would want on the free-throw line with the score tied and two seconds left?

For 10 of the 12 players, the answer to question A was Easterly. And six of 12 wanted Easterly at the line with the game on the line.

Including Easterly.

Easterly’s answer to question B: “Lisa or me.”

Easterly, 22, is finishing her fourth year as a USC starter. She and teammate Lisa Leslie, a 6-5 junior center, were both recently named to the All-Pac-10 team.

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Always, the name of her game has been versatility.

A player who plays every position is sort of an oddball. She’s the sports oddball of her family, too.

Jim Easterly, 57, met his wife Goldie while he was being recruited by colleges as a pitcher in the mid-1950s.

“Dad gave up his college and sports plans because he fell in love with my mom and they got married,” Easterly said.

“My parents had five kids, and I’m the baby. Dad always wanted one of his three sons to become a college athlete, but none did.”

Last season at a USC-UCLA game, Easterly’s father might have bailed out the Trojans.

“I was having an atrocious game,” Easterly said. “I think I was one for 13 from the floor. We were tied and we called time with 17 seconds left and the team manager handed me a note Dad had passed down.

“It said: ‘Remember, Honey, you’re the best.’ That made me feel great, but I never expected coach to go to me for the last shot, not the way I’d shot.

“But she said: ‘Jones, we’re going to you.’

“I got a shot off the left elbow, I made it, and we won.”

The Easterly family is a religious one. In 1982, Jim Easterly moved his family from Sweet Home, Ore., to Dallas so he and his wife could attend a Bible college there. At her junior high there, 12-year-old Joni was a minority student.

“The school was 75% black,” she said. “I was the only white kid on the basketball team. It was a neat experience. Culturally, I learned so much. In Sweet Home, there was one black family.

“From my black teammates, I learned how to talk to people who weren’t like me, people who’d been raised in a different environment.”

Easterly is a 3.0 student in USC’s business administration school.

Of Stanley, Easterly says: “Coach Stanley has been great. I couldn’t be happier with her. She’s very intense about basketball, and that’s made me more intense.”

To Easterly, basketball is a contact sport. During an interview, she showed a deep scratch running from inside her left elbow to her wrist, where it ended in a poker chip-size blue bruise.

“That’s from someone’s fingernail,” she said. “My mom is always on my case about being feminine. But it’s hard to put a dress on and be feminine with marks and scars like this all over you.”

Off the court, “the Jones look” melts away. Her eyes light up and in rapid conversation, she changes subjects as quickly as she steals a basketball.

She talked about an education not possible without basketball.

“There’s no way they (her parents) could have sent me here without basketball. Look around the parking lots (at USC). Look at all the BMWs. If students here need money, they call home and get a $500 check in the mail.”

Then Easterly was asked what she drives. “A BMW,” she said.

Then, with the quick laugh: “Oh, no! I didn’t mean that to sound like that. See, it’s an old BMW. It’s an ’83 I bought for $3,500. And it needs a lot of work . . . “