Cupboard Is Bare, Hubbard Is Better

Three or four years after most of them arrived, everything has gone pretty much as expected for the players on the UCLA women’s basketball team.

The team that plays USC today at Pauley Pavilion is 6-0 in the Pacific 10 Conference and coming off an 80-72 victory over once-mighty Stanford last weekend.

They’re mostly juniors now, this band of high school All-Americans Coach Kathy Olivier began signing four years ago. Erica Gomez, the point guard from New Jersey, has become one of the nation’s best. And forward Maylana Martin is the centerpiece player on a 10th-ranked team with Final Four aspirations.

Marie Philman can be ranked among the Pac-10’s best forwards, and the talent shown by sophomore LaCresha Flannigan and freshman Michelle Greco has at times been spectacular.

So far, no surprises.

But there has been one unexpected development in the building of this team: Janae Louise Hubbard.

The junior’s maturation as a dominating low-post player is a bonus for Olivier.

Hubbard was rather large when she arrived at UCLA but has since slimmed significantly. She could always shoot and rebound. Now she can run too.

Anyone who saw her on Day 1 of her UCLA career might have guessed her nickname was “Fridge.” The 6-foot-4, 255-pound Hubbard says she doesn’t remember how much she weighed as a freshman but acknowledges it might have been more than 300 pounds.

She showed some athletic skills then and had a nice shooting touch in the low post. But run the court? It hurt to watch.

“No one at UCLA put pressure on me to lose weight,” she said. “They didn’t have to.

“It was obvious to me it was something I had to do. I met with a campus nutritionist my freshman year and I completely changed my eating habits. I didn’t go on a strict diet or anything, I just learned how to eat smart.”

So she has gone from taking up a lot of space on the UCLA bench to clearing out space in the low post. An offensive force, she averages 14 points and eight rebounds. She ranks with the best inside players in the conference.

Hubbard has gone from being a project to the point where it’s not a stretch to imagine her playing in the WNBA. That became clear in UCLA’s NCAA tournament loss at Alabama last season, when she was matched with Alabama’s Tausha Mills, a premier college post player.

Mills had 12 points and five rebounds, Hubbard 19 and 11. Mills was a first-round ABL draft pick.

Now, Hubbard is a pivotal figure on a team bent on going unbeaten in conference play.

“Last year, we had the feeling that we weren’t living up to our potential,” Hubbard said.

“This year, the feeling is we’re where we ought to be--in a position to reach out and grab what we want. We really feel like we can go 18-0 in the Pac-10.”

Thanks in large part to Janae, called “J” by her teammates. Always, she has loomed large.

“When she was on our freshman team,” said Donnie Johnson, her coach at Fresno High, “she weighed 265.

“She was even bigger as a sophomore, and she had the talent to dominate games. But she was so heavy she could only be effective seven to nine minutes a game. Her whole family is big. Her brother, Derek, played for me too, and at 205 pounds he was the smallest one in the family.”

Derek, a former tight end at Stanford, works for a small computer company and rooms with his sister in an apartment near UCLA.

“Derek is important to her now, because he monitors her diet,” Johnson said.

Olivier nearly lost her after one season.

“She came in to see me after her freshman season and told me she wanted to transfer out,” Olivier said. “She never explained exactly why, but I think at that point she wasn’t enjoying basketball as much as she is now. I think May [Martin] having that great freshman season was part of it, and also I think the size of UCLA bothered her.”

Now that Hubbard has learned to eat smart, Olivier wants her to play smart.

“Her improvement in two years has been phenomenal, but there is one thing she needs to work on and that’s staying out of foul trouble,” Olivier said.

“I’ve told her she can’t help us on the bench, but that’s where she has to go when she gets in early foul trouble. Part of the problem is she needs to get better defensive position . . . she needs to be more active defensively.”

If UCLA reaches the Final Four, Olivier will be able to point to Hubbard as a difference-maker, just as Hubbard’s high school coach did.

Johnson says Hubbard was a career-turning player for him.

“I owe a lot to her,” he said.

“She helped all her [teammates] get better and she made me better too. I’m the head women’s coach at Fresno City College now and Janae helped put me there.”