Huskies' Janning measures up

Matt Janning will take few by surprise after averaging 16.1 points per game a year ago. (Jim Davis/Globe Staff)

Something about Matt Janning intrigued Rene Pulley.

"You couldn't put your finger on it," the AAU coach said, "but I knew he could play."

Everybody said the same things.

He was too skinny.

Pulley would tell them all the same thing.

"I said, 'Don't look at him, watch how he plays.' "

Janning was just a junior in high school at the time, but Pulley believed more coaches should look at the player, who stood 6 feet 4 inches but weighed only 155 pounds.

So he put together some DVDs and sent them everywhere.

Ohio University. Wisconsin-Green Bay. Northern Iowa.

"On and on and on," Pulley said. "Everybody was very nice, but patronizing. They said, 'Oh, yeah, kinda like him. But, you know, I don't know.' "

He sent some DVDs to Boston College. "That's where Bill was," he said.

Bill Coen hadn't made his move to Northeastern yet. He was still an assistant with Tim O'Shea, who eventually left to coach at Ohio. When he did, Coen left for Northeastern, and he was in need of players.

That's when he thought about the DVDs.

There was one of Janning dropping 48 points in a 30-minute game for his high school team, Watertown-Mayer (Minn.).

The other DVD was from Pulley's AAU program, where Janning was on the B team, lighting up the A team for 27 points.

"You're sitting there watching him go head-to-head with a kid who's got a scholarship to Iowa State and Michigan State and Minnesota, and virtually all high major players. You say, you might not be sure if he can do it on a consistent basis, but he can play with these guys," said Coen.

Coen called up Pulley and asked if Janning was as good as the DVDs show.

Pulley said, "Trust me."

Since Coen was at BC when Pulley delivered the Eagles' eventual Player of the Year Troy Bell, trust wasn't an issue.

Coen met Pulley at a tournament in Houston to see for himself. In one game, Janning hit five threes. By that point, schools had started to pick up on him, but only in halfhearted attempts. Minnesota called Janning's high school coach about a walk-on possibility. Montana was flirting with him, too. Some coaches were saying he was a Division 2 player.

Pulley saw it differently. "It was just instinct," he said. "I just knew it was there."

Coen saw it the same way.

"He said, 'I'm going to take a chance,' " Pulley recalled.

That's the thing about recruiting, Coen said. "You can evaluate a kid's physical talents but really the indicators are the things you can't see."

Now 6-4 and 195 pounds, Janning heard the knocks about his size. He heard the knocks on him for dominating. He doesn't expect it to be any different now that he's on the brink of being one of the Colonial Athletic Association's top players.

He accepts the idea he's the league's secret star.

"I think people used to look at me and say, 'He can't play that well,' " Janning said. "I don't listen to that. I know what I can do out there, so it doesn't bother me."

Janning was a late signing in Coen's first recruiting class. In the third year for both the coach and the class, the Huskies find themselves ahead of schedule, picked second in the CAA preseason poll.

Janning, no doubt, is a factor. Coen's been able to play him at both guard positions and some small forward and let his natural playmaking abilities take over.

"Certain people just have a knack for scoring," Coen said. "It's just a natural ability that Matt has that he's enhanced through hard work."

Janning scored 16.1 points a game last season after averaging 11.6 in a Freshman of the Year campaign two seasons ago. He also pulled down 3.5 rebounds and dished out 2.4 assists last season.

"It's a little bit scary," Coen said, "because all the things that he's accomplished I don't even think he's close to becoming the player he can be at the end of his career. For all the things he does, his ceiling is unlimited."

In two seasons, Janning has already scored 869 points, and if he keeps this pace, he could end up fourth all time on Northeastern's scoring list. Coen said more than anything else this season, the Huskies need Janning to become their program player.

"That's the next step for Matt," Coen said. "That he can still score when everybody in the gym knows he's going to get the ball. If he can develop into that type of player, then we're going to have a special year."

If he did, he'd be another in a line of players Pulley's produced, from Troy Bell at BC, to Khalid El-Amin at Connecticut, to Devon George and Brandon Rush at Kansas, to Chris Humphries at Minnesota, to Isaiah Dahlman at Michigan State.

In all, Pulley's AAU team has produced 13 Freshmen of the Year.

"Every now and then you just get certain kids that you get good feelings about," Pulley said.

"It would have been terrible if [Janning] would have slipped between the cracks. But I was going to fight to the end to make sure Matt got a shot."

His size was something to consider, Coen said, but it wasn't the only thing.

"Everybody knew he was a good basketball player but everyone questioned physically could he do it at the Division 1 level. And that's a fair question. But what you don't know in the recruiting process is how big his heart is."

He was already a ballplayer under Bob Hennen at Watertown-Mayer, but making the drive from smalltown Watertown to Minneapolis to play is what turned him into a Division 1 player.

"Playing for that program," said Janning, "it really helped my game out. Just elevated it to a whole new level."