Brandon Jennings’ mentor, Kelly Williams, said over the weekend that the future Arizona Wildcat basketball player is “fine” with his academics.

His high school coach, Steve Smith, however, told Adam Zagoria in his blog for the Herald News of New Jersey that Jennings, rated the best point guard coming out of high school this season, “doesn’t have his test score (yet).

“He has taken both the SAT and the ACT,” Smith said. “He needs to get his test up a little more to correlate with his GPA.

“I think he’ll make it. I’ve had guys in this boat before. . . . He won’t get his scores back until the end of June.”

Jennings would be a freshman at Arizona in the fall. Smith did not return a call from the Citizen.

Williams said Jennings still had to be cleared by the NCAA’s Eligibility Center, “just like everyone else. There’s a process with the GPA, test scores . . . a sliding scale.”

Williams said he spoke to Jennings recently and he was under the impression everything was OK. “He’s fine. Everything is fine,” Williams said.

School ends next week.

Jennings, a McDonald’s All-American, was named Parade magazine’s player of the year this past season. He averaged 35.5 points a game.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Sports. Tags for this post: Basketball, High School, page-c02, Sports-Basketball, Sports-Basketball-High School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.