Pride of Camarillo: Jaime Jaquez Jr. flourishing in first NBA season
The '805' native and UCLA product has found early success with the Miami Heat.
— CRYPTO.com ARENA IN downtown Los Angeles erupts with bountiful cheers as his name echoes across the public address system during lineup introductions.
On a night in which four future first-ballot Hall of Famers from Los Angeles — Paul George, James Harden, Kawhi Leonard, and Russell Westbrook — are playing in front of local fans, it’s Jaime Jaquez Jr. who is the toast of the town.
Jaquez, who spent four years at nearby UCLA, is a bit of a local legend, and on Mexican Heritage Night, it’s Jaquez that a large swathe of Angelinos are here to see.
The 6-foot-6 forward was selected No. 18 overall by the Miami Heat in June’s NBA Draft, and Jaquez already finds himself firmly in Miami’s rotation just a few months into the season.
Through the first 43 games of Jaquez’s rookie campaign, the gritty forward is averaging 13.3 points, 3.8 rebounds, and 2.6 assists on 50.2 percent shooting while playing 29.7 minutes per game. Only Charlotte’s Brandon Miller, the No. 2 pick in June, and Oklahoma City’s Chet Holmgren, last year’s No. 2 pick, are averaging more minutes than Jaquez.
But Jaquez’s journey didn’t just magically arise in Los Angeles and with UCLA.
You have to travel 50 miles northwest along the California coast to find the enclave that helped produce the talent.
— GO FAST ENOUGH along the 101 freeway and you’ll pass by it with no real notion of what lies within its winding roads and abundant landscape; a city nestled snuggly in the charmingly-sounding Pleasant Valley, with two mountain ranges surrounding the region and the Pacific Ocean a mere 10 minutes away.
Camarillo, which is sandwiched between its much more famous neighbors Oxnard and Thousand Oaks, is an often overlooked area.
Known more for its outlet mall that sits along the 101 which brings droves of tourists by the busload each weekend, Camarillo is also something of a hidden sports haven for those with the will to work far away from fanfare.
It’s there you’ll find a high school named after the city’s founder sitting atop a mound that allows those who occupy the stands of the football stadium a view of passing cars trudging to their next destination along the freeway.
That same Adolfo Camarillo High School, whose teams are known as the Scorpions, is where sports stars Delmon Young, the No. 1 overall selection in the 2003 Major League Baseball draft; Jessica Mendoza, Stanford softball standout and current analyst for both ESPN and the Los Angeles Dodgers; Joe Borchard, a first-round pick in the 2000 MLB Draft after spending four years at Stanford where he also played quarterback; and Bryan Anger, the current punter for the Dallas Cowboys, all honed their craft.
Despite the success of plenty of prep stars, the city has never had someone join the NBA ranks. Until now.
“I think a lot of people use the word proud around here,” former Camarillo high school boys basketball coach and current teacher Michaeltore Smith tells Russo Writes. “They say, ‘Pride of Camarillo’. Everybody’s proud of what he's done.”
Jaquez is as local as local gets, attending Las Colinas Middle School before enrolling in Camarillo High.
“I kind of saw Jaime in middle school when Jaime was an 8th grader at Las Colinas Middle School,” Smith said. “His dad obviously was an assistant coach here on the boys’ side before I took over. So I’d see him around at games and had access to see him. I saw him around the city in some middle school stuff. So I kind of saw him at his younger ages even before he got here.”
It was Jaquez’s time in high school that almost felt like the stuff of legend.
After all, it’s hard to get recruiters, scouts, and coaches from the collegiate level to come out to Camarillo and watch a player. It’s close to Los Angeles in a general sense, but not too close for most people to take time out of their day to make the trek.
“I was emailing coaches and calling coaches like, hey, I got a kid’s who pretty doggone good. I know we’re at Camarillo, but he’s pretty doggone good,” said Smith, remembering how hard it was at times to get eyeballs to see his prized pupil.
“Early on, it was just kind of like, yeah, okay. People come and see him and say, oh, well, we don’t know how good he’s gonna be. And I was like, all right, you got to go find out one way or the other. People ended up finding out a lot of ways the hard way. There was a lot of people that didn’t recruit him as well as they could have.”
— IT SURELY IS not easy for a rookie to break into the main rotation of a team that just went to the NBA Finals, but in Jaquez’s case, that’s exactly where he finds himself.
Jaquez nabbed his first-ever start in just his third career NBA game, a tremendous feat for a player who was not a lottery selection. The only other rookie non-lottery pick in the last three seasons to start within a team’s first three games was New Orleans’ Herbert Jones.
That Jaquez landed in Miami is no mistake. They value the intangibles and work ethic that the 22-year-old brings to the table, something Smith was quick to point out.
“He’s a humble [person], he’s true to himself. To me, that’s part of Heat culture, right?” Smith proclaims. “You need people that you can trust, people that are gonna work a certain way, people that you don’t have to worry about coming in as fake or phonies, and he’s not that. They know exactly what they're getting in him, and he’s shown that, and that’s what really, I think, has led to some of his early success even as a rookie.”
Jaquez has six games of at least 20 points thus far this season, and the Heat are 25-18 when the forward plays. The rookie recently missed six games in January due to a left groin strain. The Heat went 1-5 during that stretch.
That impact has made Jaquez already invaluable to a Heat squad attempting to make a second consecutive Finals and their third in the last five seasons. (As an aside: the Heat have a plus-7.1 Net Rating in the 407 minutes that Jaquez has played alongside superstar wing Jimmy Butler.)
Work ethic is a phrase you’ll hear a lot in regards to Jaquez, and for good reason.
You don’t make the NBA from a city like Camarillo without possessing a mammoth work ethic and the ability to persevere through all sorts of situations.
“I just look at it as a lot of hard work,” Jaquez tells Russo Writes in an exclusive interview. “And just it all paying off, honestly.”
Following the Jan. 1 game between the Clippers and Heat, Jaquez was philosophical with reporters, pointing out how honored he felt to be in the position that he’s presently in.
“When you put it in perspective, I mean, there’s only been, what, like 4,500 players ever [to] put on the NBA jersey?” Jaquez remarked.
“So, when you put it in great perspective, I mean, it’s just really special to be able to do that. You know, there’s guys along the way who would love to be in this position. Unfortunately, they couldn’t make it, but that’s why, you know, you have blessings and I’m just so blessed to be in this position that I am right now.”
— BACK IN 2016, Jaquez made a pit stop in Colorado to play as part of the 2016 USA Basketball Junior National Team mini-camp.
It was the same camp that saw the likes of Mo Bamba, Jaren Jackson Jr., Michael Porter Jr., Collin Sexton, Trae Young, Cole Anthony, Onyeka Okongwu, Isaac Okoro, Isaiah Stewart, James Wiseman, and a whole host of talent that has now made their various marks in the NBA.
It’s an experience that Smith remembers fondly.
“So actually the first time that he was invited to the Team USA tryout, I actually went with him on that trip,” Smith recollects.
“I went with him to Colorado Springs for that tryout that he had. I know for him, and I think it was just one of those eye-opening experiences to see the type of kids that he was exposed to. They were the kids obviously, they were obviously some really good players. I remember Michael Porter Jr. at the time was one of the top players at the camp there. There were just some guys that were already kind of pegged as that next level of kid. Obviously, Jaime was riding the mix with those kids, and for him, I think it was good for him to get that experience. But it was definitely a whole different world that had kind of opened up for him to be invited to that event.”
Jaquez would go back the following year to participate in the 2017 USA Men’s Junior National Team October minicamp, as well as the 2017 USA Basketball Men’s U16 National Team training camp.
It was another step in what would be a long line of validations that Jaquez belonged at that level, even while toiling away in overlooked Camarillo.
Jaquez also starred for Paul Pierce’s EYBL team and made waves as early as 2016 for his exploits.
Everywhere you looked, Jaquez was there amongst the elite. And, if you ask Smith, it’s Jaquez’s mind that serves as the biggest reason why.
“Some of the stories that I tell people is that it didn’t matter if we’re running sprints, if we're playing one-on-one, two-on-two, he always wanted to be on top,” Smith recalls. “He always wanted to win. He had that competitive edge that sometimes kids kind of go in and out of. He didn’t really kind of come in and out of it. He was always competitive when it came to working out or practices or games. He always had a competitive edge that kind of separated him. So, I really think that was kind of the difference that I saw when he was a young player.”
— MIAMI FALLS TO the Clippers on that New Year’s night, but for fans in the arena, they still got to see a local kid make good.
“I definitely felt and heard the love from the people in the crowd,” Jaquez, who scored 15 points in nearly 40 minutes, tells reporters after the game. “I just want to please shout out to everybody, you know, supporting me through all these years. It wasn’t a home game for us, but it felt like a home game for me and I was just really happy to see all the support.”
While Jaquez might be playing basketball nearly 3,000 miles from where he honed his skills, the people from the area haven’t forgotten him or what he’s meant.
“We’re all proud of what he’s done and where he’s at and what he’s doing,” Smith declares. “I get some of the basketball players in class and we’ll watch some of the old videos online and they like, you know, we talk about it and just experiences. It was just a different level of basketball here. It was just a different energy and atmosphere at the games and level of competition. I mean, the players that came in and out of the gym that we were playing against, because of who he was and the level he brought us to.”
Long before the flowing locks and NBA buckets, Jaquez roamed the halls of Camarillo High, marching to and from class in between bouts of athletic genius; the same halls where a new group of kids find themselves traversing through.
“He’s that milestone that kids can look at and say, he was one of our, one of the kids, a Camarillo student just like myself, or I know they have a chance to do that too, obviously, if things worked out in their favor,” Smith asserts.
When asked by Russo Writes in an exclusive interview what he wants to leave as his imprint on the game, Jaquez was thoughtful.
“Just [as] a guy who played hard, he’ll do everything he can to win, and made an impact bigger than myself,” Jaquez proclaims.
That impact will be felt for years to come; not just in Los Angeles or Miami but most of all in a small, quaint city that most people couldn’t pinpoint on a map if asked.
That home, no matter how far his basketball career takes him, is never too far from Jaquez’s mind: “Shout out to ‘805’, and go Scorps!”