Former Tyner star a big talent in a small package
While signing up youth basketball players for one of his camps during his time as Tyner’s coach, Gerald Harris couldn’t help but notice a gangly little kid shooting and playing on a side court.
So he looked at the kid’s father, Troy Jones — who was signing up his oldest son, also named Troy, for the camp — and suggested the younger son stay as well.
“He told me, ‘He’s not old enough,’” Harris recalled recently. “I told him, ‘Put that kid in camp.’”
The Jones family was relatively new to the Chattanooga area. Although Troy had grown up here, he was well traveled, settling in New Orleans at one point before having to relocate due to Hurricane Katrina decimating the family’s home in August 2005.
As for that gangly little kid, Devante Jones’ first experiences with coaches in Chattanooga were with former Brainerd standout Mark Smith and legendary coach Robert High, who accumulated 1,001 wins in his career. That day was the first time Harris encountered Jones, but his initial evaluation yielded one observation: The kid was a player.
And years later, it turns out he was right.
In two seasons at Coastal Carolina, where he will be a junior in the 2020-21 season, Jones has been named the Sun Belt freshman of the year (despite missing 12 games due to an injury) and was an all-conference selection after a sophomore season in which he averaged 17.4 points, 5.8 assists and 5.8 rebounds per game. He’s already just 122 points away from 1,000 in his Chanticleers career, which would make him the 23rd player in program history to reach that milestone.
He has filled out to 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, according to his Coastal Carolina bio, but while at Tyner he was the confident but skinny kid whose jersey didn’t fit. Yet the talent was evident early on, as he once knocked down the go-ahead 3-pointer for the Rams in a region championship victory
over Brainerd in 2014, helping his program to its sixth state tournament appearance.
After that season, Jones went back to New Orleans, where he averaged 17 points, six rebounds, five assists and four steals per game for St. Augustine School. Going from Tyner to an all-boys Catholic school wasn’t a choice Jones initially embraced, but in time he got used to it.
St. Augustine went 52-9 over his final two high school seasons, which Jones followed up with a prep school year at Notre Dame in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where he averaged more than 30 points per game over the final two months of the season before becoming a late addition to the Chanticleers’ 2017 signing class.
“We are excited D.J. has decided to join our basketball family here at Coastal Carolina,” coach Cliff Ellis said after Jones signed. “What a great addition. He is a talented guard with a very good basketball IQ and just has a great feel for the game. D.J. is a competitor and winner. I feel very confident that our backcourt is in good hands for the next four years with the addition of D.J.”
Like Harris years before, Ellis turned out to be right. Jones has flourished as a lead guard, pacing the team in scoring and assists and coming in second in rebounding last season. His productivity nearly led him to enter the NBA draft pool this year, although he was talked out of it by some professional scouts due to the coronavirus pandemic limiting evaluation opportunities.
There are still things he has to work on — he shot 30% from 3-point range as a sophomore, although he made 41% of his 27 attempts in his final six games — but he’ll have at least one more college season to develop that.
In the meantime, his production in some areas, namely rebounding, has caught the eye of some at the next level.
“I feel like at my size, I’ve got to do everything,” Jones said. “I’ve got to do the little things that stand out to the NBA scouts. When I was talking to NBA scouts (prior to the pandemic), they told me that my rebounding was one of the things that stood out, so if I can continue to do it at a high rate, it raises the chances of my dreams coming true.”
But coming from the small, slight, slender kid whose No. 11 Tyner jersey hardly fit him to now being one of the top mid-major guards in the country, he’s already gone further than maybe he ever truly believed.
“I always dreamed about being in this spot, but I didn’t know if the dreams would come true,” Jones said. “Living in Chattanooga, I never thought I would be in a spot where my name is out this much. I’m blessed to be in this situation, but I have to keep working.”