Nimble Mind

There is an area high school running back who already has surpassed the 1,500 mark. In fact, he accomplished the feat without even carrying the ball.

All Damon Francis needed was a No. 2 pencil to hit 1,550--his score on the Scholastic Assessment Test.

Francis’ total placed him in the top 1% in the nation and is only 50 points shy of a perfect score.

Student-athlete indeed.

A wing back and cornerback for the North Hollywood High football team, Francis also plays point guard for the Huskies’ basketball team and is a sprinter on the track team. Seems that he juggles sports as easily as he does schoolbooks.

“I like doing it all or else I wouldn’t be doing it,” said Francis, a senior who has a perfect 4.0 grade-point average and hopes to attend Columbia or Stanford. He even finds time to play the piano every night. Jazz, his favorite music, relaxes him.

“Everything else I do is a lot of work,” said Francis, who favors Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. “When you’re running around a football field or a coach is telling you to get below his hand when you’re playing defense on the basketball court, you’re pushing yourself to an extreme. When you’re playing piano, you’re pushing yourself to a different extreme, a creative extreme.

“There’s no pressure on you. Just lay back and relax. Nobody’s listening to you except yourself. Come up with something nice, you play it again.”

Francis wasn’t in harmony watching the football team as a spectator last year. After briefly contemplating playing football, he decided that working on his basketball game was more important.

Then the football team dropped its fifth game in a row.

“I heard the [negative] talk around school and it ticked me off as much as it ticked [the players] off,” Francis said. “I was looking down onto the field and said, ‘I’m an athlete. I can help these guys out.’ ”

And he has.

Although his rushing statistics through four games--nine carries for 44 yards--are nothing to brag about, Francis has breakaway potential.

“We keep waiting for Damon to break the big one because he’s got the speed,” North Hollywood Coach Gary Gray said. “He just doesn’t have the experience.”

Francis does have impressive skills at cornerback. His speed--he covers 100 meters in 11.2 seconds--makes him a natural cover man, and he has the team’s only two interceptions.

Despite his relatively diminutive frame--he’s 5-foot-8, 138 pounds--Francis wallops ballcarriers.

The public-address announcer’s voice jumped a few octaves in a recent game after Francis felled an opponent during kickoff coverage. “He’s laying some big hits for a kid his size,” Gray said.

Before he joined the football team, all of Francis’ hits came in the classroom. He hasn’t received a grade other than A on his report card since eighth grade. He is in North Hollywood’s magnet program for the highly gifted and will have completed eight advanced-placement courses by the end of the school year.

His personality wins too.

“He’s got a great sense of humor and he is at a maturity level that enables him to get along with any age level,” said Joyce Mundel, coordinator of the school’s magnet program for the gifted. “If there is such a thing as a Renaissance man in this modern world, it would be him.”

Francis is quick to credit his supporting cast--teachers, coaches, friends and parents Edna and Bill.

Francis even remembers back to kindergarten, when a teacher, Miss Marin, nudged him in the right direction.

“I don’t think I would have liked school the rest of my life if I didn’t have her,” Francis said. “She made everything fun to do, fun to learn.”

Francis is happy with his current direction, but he’s not sure what he wants to study in college. He favored science as a youngster, but English is making a late run.

All he knows for sure is that expectations for him run high--sometimes too high.

“I’m not invincible and I try to let people know that,” Francis said. “Some people just don’t get it. I don’t want them to build me up and when I make a mistake, which I do like anyone else does, I want them to realize it’s going to happen and they’re going to have to help me out.”

Francis has few regrets but one still stands out.

As North Hollywood’s backup point guard last season, he found himself intimidated.

“When I got on the basketball court and I’m 5-8 and everybody else is 6-4 and 6-5, I started to doubt myself,” he said.

Francis constantly scrimmaged against teammate Arthur Lee, now at Stanford on a basketball scholarship.

“I’d come out on the court,” Francis said, “and instead of looking at Art’s waist and thinking which way it was moving and which way I’m supposed to go with it, I’m thinking about what he was going to say after he blows by me and what all the people in the gym were going to say after he beats me.”

Francis quickly demonstrated applied knowledge on the court. “I learned during the year how not to be intimidated and how to say, ‘I can play with these guys and I can run with these guys,’ ” he said.

Come basketball season, Francis expects to share time with two other guards--just as he now splits time at wing back.

And come next fall, Francis splits for college, to be challenged at a higher level.