Ridley Points Life in New Direction : Men’s basketball: Cal Lutheran guard doesn’t regret decision to come west and escape the mean streets of Cincinnati’s projects.

For someone raised in the projects on Cincinnati’s west side, Damon Ridley, a guard for Cal Lutheran’s basketball team, has come a long way.

Not only in the distance he has traveled, but in the lessons he’s learned.

Ridley, who is averaging 21.1 points, 4.8 rebounds, 3.0 assists and 2.6 steals for the Kingsmen (16-1), occasionally gets homesick, but never regrets his decision to come west in 1989 after leaving Cincinnati’s Withrow High.

“I just felt like I needed to get away from there,” Ridley said. “A lot of the kids who grew up with me are either selling drugs right now or in jail for something. I felt like I could expand myself a lot more than that so I really needed to get out of there. Because when you get caught up in the streets, a lot of bad things can happen.”

Ridley’s mother, Alberta, kept him on the straight and narrow by making sure he didn’t have much idle time when he was growing up.

Whether he was involved in school, playing sports or attending church functions, he had little time to be tempted by the ways of the street.

Ridley was constantly on the athletic go, participating in boxing, baseball, football and basketball before focusing on the latter sport in high school, where his coach prohibited him from playing anything else.

“I was real active because I wanted to stay out of trouble,” Ridley said.

“If you weren’t putting a lot of time into sports, you were out there doing something that you had no business doing.”

As a single mother and Cincinnati native, Alberta Ridley knew that raising her two sons on the west side would be difficult, but the struggles of everyday life formed a close bond.

“I can talk to her about anything,” Damon said. “We are just super tight. We’re like best friends.”

Alberta concurred.

“I always told him that if there is anything you want to know, ask me,” she said. “Whether it was about girls, or drugs, or whatever, I always wanted him to feel that he could talk to me about anything. But I didn’t sugar-coat things because I feel it’s very important, especially with today’s kids, to tell them the truth, to tell it like it is.”

Jon Ridley, the father, did not have much contact with Damon and his younger brother Danyea until Damon’s senior year in high school, when Withrow won the Division I title in the city championships.

“He didn’t come around much until he started seeing my name in the papers,” Ridley said with a tinge of disappointment. “But by then, it was too late for him to be my father. When I was growing up, it was my mother who took me to the doctor, or to ballgames, or taught me how to fish. All the things that a father should have done, my mother did. . . . I respect him and we stay in touch, but we’re more like friends than father and son.”

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Playing on a Withrow team that included Steve Gentry (Xavier), Carl Brown (Western Kentucky) and Walter Evans (Cleveland State), Ridley was not heavily recruited by major schools.

He went to Sierra College in Rocklin, Calif., after then-assistant coach Rick Singer heard about him through Withrow Coach George Jackson.

Ridley earned All-Bay Valley Conference honors during his freshman season, but the transition to life as an African American at a school with a predominantly white student body took some time.

“I was so used to being around African Americans and then I came to Sierra and I was the only African American in class,” Ridley said. “So it took me a long time to adjust to that. But people around (Sierra), just like (at Cal Lutheran), were so friendly that the color of your skin didn’t make a difference. That helped.”

Bur homesickness and academic difficulties got the best of Ridley in the spring of 1990, and he dropped out of school and returned to Cincinnati after basketball season.

He told Sierra Coach John Rankin that he would be back and, true to his word, he returned in the fall, regained his eligibility and averaged 18.3 points, 6.1 rebounds and 5.3 steals for the Wolverines (28-5).

He planned to continue his career at Cal State Sacramento--where Singer had moved as an assistant--but when Joey Anders, the head coach, was fired, Singer was out of a job and Ridley “had no idea what I was going to do.”

That’s when Cal Lutheran entered the picture.

Mike Dunlap had just completed his third season coaching at the NCAA Division III school and was looking to recruit a quick guard with good all-around skills. Singer told Dunlap that Ridley fit the bill, but he didn’t think Ridley would be willing to play for a small school like Cal Lutheran.

“To me it doesn’t matter who you play against or where you play,” Ridley said of his surprising decision to play for the Division III Kingsmen. “It’s all competition. No matter if you’re playing against the Sisters of the Poor, you still have to put the ball in the basket.”

Ridley led the team in scoring (15.7) and steals (3.6) last season as Cal Lutheran (20-7) won a share of its second consecutive Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference title, and he’s made big strides as a perimeter shooter this season.

He credits more repetitions in practice and improved technique with improving his field-goal percentage and three-point percentage, to 54.6 from 48.3 on the former to 50.0 from 28.6 on the latter.

“I had a tendency to drift off to the side when I shot last year,” Ridley said. “I wouldn’t jump straight up and that affected my shot.”

Dunlap is pleased that Ridley took it upon himself to become a more complete player.

“He knows that he has to be able to shoot from outside or defenses are just going to shut down the lanes when he tries to drive,” Dunlap said. “He’s worked very hard on that part of his game.”

Better communication with Dunlap has also made basketball more enjoyable for Ridley, who occasionally butted heads with his coach last season.

An earnest discussion after the season cleared the air when player and coach told each other how they felt and what they expected.

“I think that once he understood that it’s not a conditional relationship, that I’m going to treat you the same way whether you score 20 points or two points, he felt better about it,” Dunlap said. “Once he was able to say, ah, this isn’t predicated solely on that orange thing going through a hoop, we came to a level of understanding. . . . We established the ground rules for a lifelong friendship.”

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Dunlap will conclude his coaching career at Cal Lutheran this season before leaving to direct the Adelaide 36ers in Australia’s National Basketball League, and Ridley plans to join him next year after completing requirements for his degree in physical education.

For the time being, Ridley would like nothing better than to give Dunlap an NCAA title as a going-away present. Even if that doesn’t happen, he seems content with the direction his life is headed.

His mother recently bought a house in the suburban Kennedy Heights section of Cincinnati and Danyea, 17, is a junior three-sport standout at Taft High who has received letters from the football programs at Notre Dame, Georgia Tech and Penn State.

Ridley is dating Sherri Howard, a three-time Olympian in track, and enjoys the quiet, peaceful surroundings at Cal Lutheran.

“Here, it’s like La-La Land, because you don’t have to watch your back when you’re walking around and hearing gunshots,” he said. “You can go to school and just concentrate on playing ball. As far as back home, you always had to watch what was going on. I really like it here.”