Malik Stith turned 22 this week but his newbie St. John’s teammates have been calling him “Pops” all summer.
Stith finds himself in the most remarkable of positions. He has gone from being a player that wasn’t wanted to being the player St. John’s desperately needs this season if the Red Storm aren’t going to fall on their fresh faces.
Stith will be the only upper-class scholarship player on a team that is so young it needs an adult to get its players into PG-17 movies.
Pops already has fulfilled that role. The junior took several of the Fresh Princes of Jamaica — freshmen D’Angelo Harrison, Phil Greene, Sir’Dominic Pointer and junior college transfer Godsgift Achiuwa — to see Transformers. He has tipped them off on where to eat, how to get around the Queens campus and where to be on the court.
Pops has to know best because there is no other player on this team for the nine incoming players to turn to.
“I couldn’t ask for a better situation,” Stith told The Post. “We have a great group of freshmen coming in that are talented and so confident they feel like they can do anything. But they have no idea how tough the Big East is. They have no idea of the ups and downs that are coming. I have to be there for them. This is it for me.”
St. John’s is one of the last places Stith expected to be. Growing up on Long Island he dreamed of playing for Syracuse, where his father played football. But the Orange weren’t interested in a 5-foot-11 point guard with a shooter’s mentality.
When Stith went to live with his mother in North Carolina, the Tar Heels became his dream school. But the powder blue is rarely interested in a player that isn’t a burger All-American.
Then along came former St. John’s coach Norm Roberts who quickly won over Stith, who got good minutes as a freshman, but Roberts was let go after the 2009-10 season and in came Steve Lavin, who quickly made a splash by signing the nation’s third-ranked recruiting class.
One week into the job Lavin met with Stith, who had no intentions of transferring, and asked if the player he didn’t sign wanted to look at other schools — a fresh start as he called it.
“Malik said, ‘But coach, you are my fresh start. This is my new beginning,’ ” Lavin told The Post. “It stopped me in my tracks.
“There are certain moments in your coaching career that you’ll never forget. That was one of them. I had chills. He completely flipped it on me. He walked out of the locker room and I said, ‘This is a kid I want on my team.”
Stith averaged 3.3 points in 12.3 minutes last season. His 10-point, four-steal, three-rebound and three-assist performance against Arizona State in the championship game of the Great Alaska Shootout gave the Red Storm their first confidence boost under Lavin.
The Johnnies went on to post a 21-12 record, losing to Gonzaga in the NCAA tournament. The day after that loss the media, with an assist from Lavin, passed the torch to Dwayne Polee II, who was expected to bridge the gap between the 2010-11 squad and the upcoming one.
Stith, the lone junior, was virtually ignored.
“I understood what was taking place,” Stith said. “The atmosphere around here changed. We won.
“We had all these highly talented recruits coming in. People were excited and that’s what they wanted to talk about.”
But Polee shocked the Storm by opting to return home to L.A. to be closer to his family. The leadership role fell awkwardly into Stith’s hands.
“Malik has always been a leader,” his mother, Tanya Person, told The Post. “I do believe he will start to prove that this season.”
How? How does a player who doesn’t figure to start, who is at least four years older than most of his teammates, become those players’ leader?
Better yet, how does a player that has tattoos that read, ‘Rebel,’ and ‘Stand Alone’ conform and stand up?
“I remember last season Coach Lavin and Coach [Mike] Dunlap called me into the office and they said, ‘Malik, you work harder than anyone on the team. Have you ever thought about grabbing a teammate and working out?” recalled Stith.
“I realized that I was selfish,” he added. “I wasn’t being a good teammate. It was a bad habit I had to break.”
He broke it with a polo mallet. When Lavin began bringing in those highly rated freshman recruits, Stith was the one getting numbers and texting them.
When Harrison, Greene, Pointer and Achiuwa recently arrived for summer school, Stith led film sessions, answered questions and help organize workouts. Pops knows best.
“We didn’t ask him to do any of that,” Lavin said. “That’s who he is. I expect him to be a contributor on the floor and in the locker room.”