Her coach had warned you she is quiet and shy, but now, as you sit with her in a conference room overlooking a practice gym, the words pour out of Candis Jackson.
She is eager to tell her story, glad someone asked because she wants other basketball players to avoid the mistake she made. She wants them to understand that when colleges are chasing after you, you had better be careful on whom you depend for advice.
Jackson depended on the wrong person, and the result was a world turned upside down, not to mention a promising basketball career that was sidetracked, almost for good.
“I don’t want other people to wind up in the situation I was in,” the St. Xavier University point guard said Friday. “By me saying this, maybe it will influence some people.
“I always wanted to tell highly recruited players, `Just be careful what school you choose and who you surround yourself with.'”
Jackson’s life went south after she ended an All-State career at Young in 2002 and enrolled at Mississippi. Within days of arriving, she realized she had made a huge mistake.
Part of it involved the coaching staff, and the shift from the South Side of Chicago, where she was born and raised, to small-town Oxford, Miss., was no doubt jarring.
But the biggest factor was apparently her realization that a man who had steered her toward Mississippi, a “father figure” who “had been with me since I was in 8th grade,” was not the trusted friend she believed he was.
Jackson won’t say much about this. She isn’t looking for trouble, and it’s clear the pain still lingers, but when you mention that the guy sounds like a street agent, she doesn’t disagree.
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It didn’t help that Arthur Penny retired as Young coach after Jackson’s junior year. Corry Carter, his replacement, didn’t know Jackson well enough to neutralize the outsiders who had her ear.
“There were certain influential people who had known her a longer time,” Carter said. “I’m not sure the people she listened to, one in particular, had her best interests at heart, and it ended up hurting her.”
Jackson felt so alone and unhappy at Mississippi that she even lost her love for basketball. This was a game she had cherished since she was a kid shooting mini-basketballs at a hoop she and some cousins created from a plastic milk crate they nailed to a pole in an alley.
Jackson was a star from Day 1 at Young and surrounded by people she thought were her friends. Those buddies disappeared, though, when she returned from Mississippi in September 2002, only a month after she arrived there.
“When you’re on top, everyone wants to be your friend,” she said. “They tell you this and that, but in reality they want something from you. In reality they’re only out for themselves.”
She quickly enrolled at Malcolm X College but quit the basketball team there after just three games because it didn’t seem to be a serious program.
About that time, Jackson learned she was pregnant. She left school that summer and gave birth to Jaylen Drane in October 2003.
Having a son strengthened Jackson’s resolve to re-enter college. She took junior college courses via the Internet and started to research possible destinations.
“She was real determined, real determined,” Jackson’s mother, Kim Caddle, said. “She said, `If I have to take Jaylen to school with me or take him to practice, I’ll do that because I’m going to go back to school and play ball.”
Jackson settled on St. Xavier, an NAIA school on the far Southwest Side, in part because it wasn’t far from her mother’s home, where she had lived since returning to Chicago, and in part because she would have more seasons of eligibility there than at an NCAA school.
Last spring, with her son and two scrapbooks in hand, she showed up unannounced to see St. Xavier women’s coach Bob Hallberg. Hallberg had seen Jackson play at Young but knew he had as much chance of getting her then as he did of beating Tennessee.
Now she was in his office, though he didn’t recognize her at first.
“She said, `My name is Candis Jackson and I played at Whitney Young. Would you like to look at my scrapbook?’ ” Hallberg recalled. “I started to turn the pages and saw she averaged 25 points a game and had been recruited by Iowa and Illinois, and I said, `Sit down. I think we have a spot for you.’ “
Jackson needed a few credits to become eligible, so she didn’t make her basketball debut until Dec. 21. St. Xavier was 2-8 then. With a victory Saturday, it is 18-10. They are No. 25 in the NAIA Division I poll.
Jackson, an immediate starter, has been a major part of the turnaround despite some rust and despite her reluctance to take over a game the way Hallberg wants her to.
“My biggest problem is to get her to shoot more,” he said. “Sometimes I think she’s too team oriented.”
Jackson, who recently turned 21 but has sophomore eligibility, calls enrolling at St. Xavier “the best decision I’ve made.” To make it work, she performs a delicate balancing act as a student, an athlete and a mom.
A village of sorts helps her do it by watching Jaylen when she’s in class or in the gym, including the boy’s father, Larry Drane, a former Young player who remains Jackson’s boyfriend.
“It is hard, but we get it done,” she said. “And Jaylen is so much fun. He’s full of joy all the time.”
Jackson is funding her education with a partial athletic scholarship, regular financial aid and family help. She is majoring in communications and hopes to play in the WNBA or an overseas professional league after she graduates.
No matter how far she travels, though, it’s doubtful it will be a tougher journey than the one she has already made.
“I think that has made me a better person,” she said of what she calls her trials and tribulations. “I’m still trying to fulfill my dream to get my degree and play professionally.
“Even though I have been through a lot, I don’t feel I’ve let anything stop me. I’m still going for it.”
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