Lifting School to New Heights : Only Freshmen, Rangy Collins Twins Push Harvard Toward Respectability

If their orthodontist is right, Jason and Jarron Collins are going to be really dangerous on a basketball court in a few years.

Somehow, looking in the mouths of Harvard-Westlake High’s newest stars, the dentist judges the two have three or four inches of growth remaining. The twins turned 15 last month and Jason is already 6-feet-8 while Jarron is 6-7.

Three or four more inches? Can the dentist be right?

“That’s a little frightening,” said Crespi High Coach Paul Muff, who watched the freshmen lead Harvard to a 32-point victory against the Celts a couple weeks ago. “Our league isn’t that big, and I think that gives Harvard a little bit of an advantage on everybody.”

The once-hapless Wolverines bring a 13-0 record, 3-0 in Mission League play, into tonight’s game at home against Loyola (8-5, 3-0), the consensus league favorite. Loyola beat Harvard twice by a combined 73 points last season. But, thanks to the Collins twins, the Wolverines actually have a chance to win this time.

It’s surprising when you consider Harvard is a school in which you’re more likely to find championship banners for water polo and tennis--even something called the academic team--than basketball.

The basketball tradition revolves around the 1990 team, which had a No. 1 ranking in a small-schools division, largely because of a roster full of all-star volleyball players tall enough to dunk a basketball.

Last season, Harvard was 5-20. The tallest player was center Don Katz, all 6-feet-2 of him. But he didn’t play even that tall. Rebounds were rumors.

After the season, Coach Greg Hilliard heard rumors.

“Somebody told me that these two kids who had applied to our school were two of the best 14-year-olds in the country,” Hilliard said. “I laughed and said, ‘We’ll probably never see them.’ But then they were accepted and I started to get excited.

“Then I saw them duck their heads when they came in the door.”

The Collins twins figured to be tall. Their father, Paul, is 6-4 and their mother, Portia, is 6-feet. One grandfather is 6-3 and the other 6-5. An uncle is 6-8 and an aunt 6-1.

The twins, who are identical and most easily distinguished off the court because Jason wears high-top shoes and Jarron does not, have no siblings.

As Jason and Jarron grew, they abandoned other sports in favor of basketball. They rose through the system in the American Roundball Corp., playing in all-star tournaments against older players.

Last summer, the two were the first eighth-graders to play in the ARC national high school tournament in Las Vegas, ARC president Rich Goldberg said.

“We’ve always played against people stronger and bigger and older than us,” Jason said.

Stronger and older, sure, but bigger?

“Yeah, when we were smaller,” Jason said. “Like 6-4.”

They attended junior high at Montclair Prep, spending two years in eighth grade because they started school a year early and had been among the youngest in their class, they said. They enrolled at Harvard for ninth grade, even though they had to travel from their home in Granada Hills to the school’s campus in Bel-Air, site of the middle school that includes the freshman class.

Paul Collins, who works in the employee benefits department of an insurance company in Universal City, has sent his sons to private schools since kindergarten because of the academics. In fact, he considered starting Jason and Jarron at Harvard in the seventh grade, but “We felt three years driving over the hill would be a bit much.”

The academics at Harvard surely impressed the Collins family. Because the basketball team surely did not.

Coinciding with the Wolverines moving up from the San Fernando League to the more competitive Mission League last season was one of the shallowest talent pools in Hilliard’s nine years at the school. They were 1-13 in league play.

“The hardest part was they were basically good kids but had very little chance to compete in this new league they were in,” Hilliard said. “It was hard to explain that maybe winning wasn’t our goal going into every game. We had to set our sights a little lower.”

What the Wolverines lacked was height. Teams pounded them inside on offense and spread out on defense to take away the outside shots, Harvard’s only weapon. The Collins twins have changed all that.

Jason, more of a true post player than Jarron, is averaging 17.5 points, 10.8 rebounds, 2.7 blocks and shooting 73.8% from the field. During last week’s Covina tournament, he averaged 14.8 points and 10.2 rebounds, leading the Wolverines to the title and earning a share of the MVP award.

Jarron is a guard in a forward’s body. He hangs around the foul line, shooting jumpers and dishing off. He even brings the ball upcourt now and then. Last season, at 6-5, he played point guard for the junior high team at Montclair Prep. He is averaging 8.9 points and 6.8 rebounds this season.

You’d like to think they play some nasty games of one-on-one. Not. Haven’t played each other in a few years, they said. Too busy for that. They save their best for their opponents.

“I’m very impressed with both of them,” Muff said. “We had them on film and they were much better in person. I was totally impressed with their poise. They don’t play anything like freshmen.”

Despite the praise--and it comes from all corners--the twins remain level-headed. They reject the notion that the turnaround is solely because of their presence.

“They’ve earned all the respect from everybody,” senior guard Scott Garson said. “I would get all over them if I saw any type of ego, but there is none of it.”

Although they are quiet and a little shy off the court, they don’t hesitate to respond verbally or physically to challenges on the court. Most opponents look at the slender boys and figure the way to stop them is to push them around. But that hasn’t worked. They aren’t as scrawny as they look. Jason weighs 210, Jarron about 200.

“They have attitude,” Alemany Coach Robert Webb said. “We have some freshmen with attitude but they are on the freshman team. They have attitude and they back it up.”