Ron Kantowski on Centennial High School star Italee Lucas taking her game to new heights

By Ron Kantowski

Monday, Jan. 15, 2007 | 7:19 a.m.

It was late in the first quarter when the ball found its way to No. 50 of the Centennial High girls' basketball team as it has for the better part of the past three years: As if it were made of metal, and Italee Lucas had magnets in her palms.

Cupping the ball with her left hand, she used her right to slap it, the way the playaz in the schoolyards back East do, when they're about to do something special. Even if they don't exactly know what that something special is going to be.

When basketball ceases being a team sport and morphs into a jazz recital, people stop keeping score. So with Centennial already coasting toward another 40-point victory, Lucas slapped the ball, as if to say to the spectators who already had lost interest ,"Hey, you might want to watch this."

Then she became Herbie Hancock.

Head fake, shoulder shudder. See ya' defender No. 1.

Crossover dribble with a hesitation, jab step left. Goodbye defender No. 2.

Another dribble toward the 3-point line in the corner - hey, where did defenders three and four come from?

Lucas had kept her dribble alive, so she proceeded along the baseline, trying to shake the intruders now occupying her offensive space.

Uh-oh. Running out of room.

But just when it appeared she would be forced out of bounds, Lucas turned her body and made it real slender, like somebody ducking into a secret passage through a bookcase in a scary movie. The only problem is that put her under the backboard at an impossible angle to make the lay up with her left hand.

I should have said improbable angle. Because Lucas jackknifed like Greg Louganis and reached back under the backboard to flip the ball high and softly off the glass with her right hand for two of her 38 points.

Perhaps the fifth Mojave defender could have stopped her. But like the rest of us, she was probably too busy watching the artistry unfold with her mouth agape.

The basket I just described was Lucas' most spectacular of the night, but only by a little, considering she made a four-point play a couple minutes later on a shot that originated near Boulder City.

"Italee shot the ball real well tonight," said Karen Weitz, Centennial's taskmaster coach who tosses compliments around as if they were manhole covers with bowling balls on top. "It's not always like that."

In fact, it wasn't like that during much of the first quarter. Lucas is so much better than almost everybody she plays against that it's easy to lose focus. She was scoreless after four minutes and appeared disinterested, so Weitz took her out.

When she put her back in, it looked like Curley Neal dribbling through the Washington Generals. I think the next shot Lucas missed was the next day at practice.

She began her senior season with 1,930 points, 406 rebounds, 349 assists, 323 steals and 45 blocked shots, so statistically, what else is there to prove? Centennial won four consecutive state championships but came up a little short last year, when Weitz took a sabbatical to coach in college, so there's always that, I suppose.

Bishop Gorman, the team that prevented the Bulldogs from making it five in a row, is undefeated this year and ranked among the top 10 in the national polls, so exacting revenge on the Gaels might be the ideal way to lower the curtain on her spectacular high school career.

Her dad agrees. "You want your kid to play well but at the same time, you want her to get out of here (high school) with no injuries," LaMar Lucas said at halftime at Mojave.

He was wearing a Carolina blue ball cap with a big tar-stained foot on front. That's because his daughter, the No. 2-rated point guard in the country by Hoopgirlz.com, has signed with North Carolina, a perennial NCAA Final Four contender which was ranked No. 1 most of last year.

Italee is being groomed to take the place of All-American Ivory Latta at point guard in the fall, and LaMar, a pretty good player himself back in the day at Wayland Baptist in Texas, plans to catch as many games as he can. A Clark Count y fire fighter, La Mar said he already is synchronizing his schedule at the firehouse with that of Piedmont Airlines.

He told me he has been working with Italee, who was also an outstanding soccer player, since she was 3. About the only time they are apart is when she's playing and he's watching from the stands.

When I contacted him for this story and said I'd like to chat with Italee, he said she would be home at 8.

At 8:01, my phone rang. "She's walking in the door right now," LaMar Lucas said.

I was going to tell him that I could wait until Italee hung up her coat, but he had already handed his daughter the phone.

She said no, she doesn't get bored during games because she is still trying to improve hers; and yes, she is going to miss her high school friends and teammates when she goes to North Carolina. And she said yes and no - there will be pressure to step into Latta's shoes as a true freshman but it's not anything for which her experience with West Coast Elite, her AAU summer league team, and the U.S. Women's Under 18 National Team, hasn't prepared her.

Italee Lucas is a nice girl and a pretty girl and like most kids her age, she seems a little shy while responding to boring questions from a reporter, especially when she is planning her 18th birthday party for the following evening.

So I asked about her new baby sister, Aja, born six weeks ago.

"She's s-o-o-o-o cute," Lucas said with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for having one's bedtime extended.

She didn't know that I had already spoken to her dad about her baby sister and had asked how long before Aja develops a head-and-shoulder fake like her older sister.

"Gimme another week and a half," LaMar Lucas said.

I think he was joking.