A.J. Rompza and D’Frantz Smart are point guards out to make a point.
The juniors, who run the show for Young’s basketball teams, are determined to prove that size is just a state of mind.
Rompza is listed, optimistically, at 5 feet 9 inches, but in his mind he’s 6-9. He plays with a smile that’s borderline cocky and a swagger that knows no doubt.
“He’s a tough little son of a gun,” Young boys coach Tyrone Slaughter said. “He has a little edge to him.”
Smart, listed at 5-1, also thinks big. She competes with a jaw-thrust-out feistiness that recalls the Revolutionary War slogan, “Don’t tread on me.”
“Size doesn’t matter,” Smart said recently in a tone of pleasant defiance. Rompza, sitting close by in Young’s gym, nodded emphatically.
“Dynamite,” he said, “comes in small packages.”
Both exploded onto the Chicago Public League basketball scene last winter as sophomore starters. Smart scored a game-high 16 points Feb. 27 in a 49-29 supersectional victory over Loyola Academy to help lead her team into the Class AA Elite Eight, where it finished third.
Rompza, a left-hander with a knack for scoring on lightning spin moves into the lane, established himself as one of the city’s top young players while finishing as Young’s second-leading scorer.
They have thrived because of great quickness, mental toughness, hard work and skill. Neither, though, is remotely close to satisfied because each figures a few small-minded onlookers might need more convincing.
“Some people look at us and think because we’re small we won’t be able to compete with them,” Rompza said. “But we show them we’re tough.”
They do it with words–neither shies away from talking smack–and actions. Last season, for example, Rompza wrestled an opponent 6 inches taller and 60 pounds heavier for the ball, refusing to release it–even after the whistle blew–until the other guy let go first.
“You might think he’d back away, but he doesn’t,” Slaughter said. “He meets it head on.”
Smart takes a similar approach.
“A lot of times people push her, foul her,” Young girls coach Corry Irvin said. “They think because she’s little they can do it.
“She’ll push them back, and they somehow miraculously wind up on the ground.”
Irvin and Slaughter agree that both players’ attitudes are a direct result of their size and a refusal to be picked on or treated differently.
“D’Frantz has a pretty strong view of herself, which enables her to go against bigger kids and beat bigger kids,” Irvin said. “I think that’s common to both of them. Both have . . . I don’t want to say cockiness, but they have a high level of confidence.”
Each guard’s team feeds off that assurance as well as the intensity that goes with it. Slaughter calls Rompza, who figures to be his primary scorer as well as main ballhandler, “the heart and soul of the team.”
Irvin said Smart’s approach is similarly infectious.
“When she plays hard and is into the game and brings her heart, everyone picks up her intensity,” Irvin said. “When she doesn’t, we are not as intense as a team.”
The challenge for both players is to avoid letting the desire to prove a point kidnap their judgment.
“I don’t want to rush into something and do something stupid on the court, which sometimes I may do,” Rompza said.
It helps each to have the other as a sounding board. Though Smart is more laid back than Rompza off the court and A.J.–Albert Jason, if you wondered–is more the funnyman, they have formed a mutual-admiration society. They compare notes and anecdotes, attend each other’s games and, of course, exchange a bit of trash talk.
“We mess around with each other a lot,” Rompza said.
Each faces at least one challenge the other doesn’t. Smart, who played mostly shooting guard last season, now goes full time at the point and must adjust to calling the plays, controlling the tempo and handling the pressure that comes with being in charge.
“I’m going to step up and be a leader,” she said. “I’m going to put everything on myself that if things don’t go right, my job as point guard is to make sure they go right.”
Rompza, meanwhile, has to deal with the reality of being a white point guard in the Public League, where guys of his color at his position are rare, especially among the league’s upper echelon.
He doesn’t make that an issue but when asked acknowledges opponents do bring it up on the court.
“It’s, `You don’t belong here; you’re too slow,'” he said with a gleam in his eye that said, “Wanna bet?”
Both he and Smart will bet they can succeed in a big-time college program. Though they are drawing Division I interest, it’s not at the high-major level. That’s the biggest frustration they share and the one they spend the most time discussing.
“The college thing is the craziest because talent-wise we’re probably among the best but are overlooked because of our size,” Smart said. “College coaches look at players who are tall, but there are players 6-1 who are not better than we are.
“To them, size matters, but really it doesn’t.”
Rompza once again nodded emphatically.
“Heart,” he said, “is what matters.”
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btemkin@tribune.com
