San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Austin Jones
School: Position: Year: College: Stats:
Bishop O’Dowd-Oakland
Running back/cornerback
Senior
Stanford
2,005 rushing yards (9.2 average), 24 TDs; 27 catches, 378 yards, 1 TD 58-16 season-opening loss at De La Salle-Concord.
“There’s not much he didn’t do this season,” Kaufman said. “There’s not much he didn’t do his entire career. And we asked him to do a lot.”
Described by those closest to him as humble — “That’s what I’ll remember about him most,” said Kaufman — Jones was taken aback by the award, which he learned about on the same day he signed his national letter of intent to Stanford.
“That means so much,” he said of the award. “There are so many talented athletes in the Bay Area. I just tried to compete every day and strived to be the best I could.”
Jones was born in Atlanta, the youngest of three children — by quite a bit. His siblings are 31 and 29 years old.
“My parents admit I was sort of a mistake,” Jones said. “But they say I was a good mistake.”
Clearly there was a mistake when Jones began playing football at age 7 in Missouri. Coaches stuck him on the line.
“I was bigger than the other kids, so it made some sense,” Jones said. “Actually I was just fatter.”
He quickly got lean and moved to quarterback when his parents moved to the Bay Area with Jones in the eighth grade. Kaufman, a running back with the Oakland Raiders for six seasons, recognized Jones would also be a runner and immediately made him O’Dowd’s workhorse. In his freshman season, Jones rushed for 1,370 yards and 12 touchdowns on 254 carries.
At first, Jones wasn’t aware of Kaufman’s football credentials.
“I knew he was good, but I didn’t know he was like AllWorld,” Jones said. “That put things right in perspective. He obviously knew what he was talking about so I just listened.”
Kaufman said Jones never had trouble competing against older kids.
“It was obviously a big change from eighth grade,” Jones said. “The kids were bigger and faster but I think I held my own.”
Jones, 18, will be making another big leap at Stanford. Once again, he’ll have to start from the bottom.
“I’ll go in and just do what the coaches tell me and work my tail off,” he said. “Hard work has worked for me so far. I think it will get me where I want to go.”
MaxPreps senior writer Mitch Stephens covers high school sports for The San Francisco Chronicle.