BIG SKY'S THE LIMIT; MATADORS COACH GUIDES HER TEAM TO TITLE.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

An unpaid balance stood between Frozena Jerro and a treasure chest full of tomorrows. Anthony Lenz never doubted if he squared the debt on Jerro's Sacred Heart-Cathedral High ledger, she would one day repay the act of kindness tenfold.

Brother Lenz, the school's athletic director, discreetly saw to it that Jerro's tuition was paid and she became part of the school's first coed graduating class in 1988. Eleven years later, using kindness as her currency, Jerro has showered a once-destitute basketball program with riches.

Under Jerro's nurturing, the Cal State Northridge women's team won its first Big Sky crown this year. With a record of 19-7 overall (13-3 in conference), CSUN is two wins away from the school's maiden trip to the NCAA Tournament.

It started out as a rocky voyage, with the squad swept off course by the on-campus arrest of head coach Michael Abraham on drug-trafficking charges. That Jerro - whose only previous head-coaching experience was at the junior high level - managed to salvage the season might seem, on the surface, surprising.

But for those close to Jerro, the Matadors' success confirmed what they've suspected for years: Fro-Jo is a born captain. All she needed was a ship.

As far back as high school, ``I was telling her that she should stop and see me after she got out of college, that I could give her a job coaching,'' Lenz said.

He would move on to become the athletic director at L.A.'s Cathedral High, but he never stopped wondering what became of the big-hearted kid who stole hearts and opponents' passes. When he found out from a journalist he and Jerro were practically neighbors, he immediately planned a trip to the CSUN campus.

``An excellent person, an excellent basketball player, a model citizen,'' is how Lenz remembers the 27-year-old.

Yeah, she's all that.

Celia Jerro's voice rises and falls, waves of sentiment buffing all the rough edges of her memories. It wasn't easy rearing a child as a single parent, though you'd never know it by looking at the smile her daughter wears like a birthmark.

``She was pretty much like the perfect child,'' Jerro said by telephone from Chicago.

Frozena's childhood, spent mostly in California, was hardly the bubble-gum stuff of Beach Boys' songs. Celia toiled long hours for a long-distance telephone service near their Palo Alto apartment. Frozena remembers being ``a serious latchkey kid. I was coming home and staying by myself in second grade.''

Before mother and daughter moved west from Chicago, Frozena was introduced to the game of basketball by her great uncle, Reuben Bolen, a onetime Harlem Globetrotter (another great uncle, David, finished fourth in the 400 meters in the 1948 Olympics in London).

Sports and school and family formed the triangle offense that Celia Jerro hoped would enable her daughter to score big in the game of life. Celia scrimped and sacrificed and when that wasn't enough, accepted financial assistance from her uncles so Frozena could attend private schools.

One semester in high school, when her family fell behind in her tuition payments, Jerro took matters into her own hands. She sat down with one of the sisters and said, ``This is a Christian school. Well, we need some Christian help.''

The upshot? ``I was able to come back,'' Jerro said with a laugh.

Jerro paid the kindly school administrators and her family back with a personality as soothing as a bubble bath. ``She always had a positive attitude,'' said her grandmother, Frozena Myers. ``She was always doing for others.''

Said Jerro, ``I guess that's just sort of my personality. I don't like to be a burden to people. I like to make people smile and be happy.''

The CSUN women's home gym is called the Matadome, but it looks more like a matchbox. Although people mock it, Jerro has made do with plenty worse. Her high school team often practiced on an outdoor court, dribbling around cracks in the asphalt and gauging the wind before launching any jumpers. Mother Nature redirected more shots than any 7-footer could.

``The rest of us would complain about having to practice outdoors, but Fro never did,'' said Diannah Cox, who was a year ahead of Jerro at Cathedral. ``She just loved the game. She was so enthusiastic.''

During Jerro's senior year, the boys' school down the block merged with its insular sister school (there were fewer than 100 students in Cox's graduating class) and formed Sacred Heart-Cathedral. The move naturally caused some upheaval.

``When we merged schools,'' Lenz remembered, ``most of the girls who played basketball stopped because boys were dominating the courts. It didn't bother Frozena. She be out there playing one on one, two on two, three on three with the boys and giving them a good game.''

Jerro averaged more than 30 points a game as a senior. ``I think she brought a lot of fans to our games,'' Cox said. ``Fro's just a natural athlete. She was a great scorer, but the thing I remember most about her game is her defense. It was awesome. She was so aggressive. And so quick. One second you'd see her, the next second she was gone.''

Cox came from San Francisco to watch CSUN's win against Sacramento State last week. And she was mesmerized by the Matadors' standout sophomore guard, Edniesha Curry. For Cox, watching Curry was a personal experience.

``It was like seeing Fro out there,'' Cox said. ``I told Fro that Edniesha reminds me of her as a player and she just laughed.''

Jerro followed Cox to St. Mary's and helped the school to two consecutive 20-win seasons. Both years, though, the program was overlooked for an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament. Jerro couldn't stand sitting home in March so in 1990 she transferred to Arizona State.

She made it to college basketball's Holy Grail as a junior in 1992, when the Sun Devils met DePaul in a first-round game in Jerro's hometown of Chicago. With members of her family in attendance, ASU lost by two.

Early in her senior season, Jerro went up for a layup and had her legs cut out from under her. She landed on her elbow and broke it - and that was pretty much it for her season and her playing career.

Maura McHugh, the ASU coach at the time, nudged Jerro into accepting a graduate assistant's job at the University of Houston. McHugh looked at Jerro and saw a natural-born coach.

``Fro seemed to have a natural affinity for the game and she has a really good temperament for coaching,'' McHugh said. ``When she played for me, everybody on the team liked her. She didn't have a big ego, she was a very upbeat person and she didn't take herself too seriously. She was a real people person. I thought she'd be a very good recruiter.''

There are sell jobs and then there was the pitch Jerro had to make in the wake of Abraham's arrest last October and the subsequent reassignment of the first interim head coach, Judy Brame.

Somehow the softspoken woman in only her second season on campus had to convince the CSUN players that basketball mattered, that it could be the glue that pieced together their fractured illusions.

The players had hand-picked her to assume the head-coaching duties, so Jerro had that going for her. Her personality and passion pretty much took over from there.

``Watching her coach, she just looks very natural out there,'' said Cox, who as a volunteer high-school coach knows it's not as easy as Jerro is making it look.

``I'll see the girls taking direction from her really well and I'm like, `How does she do that? That's hard,' '' Cox said, chuckling. ``One thing you can see is the players really relate to her.''

The proof is in the note Edniesha Curry slipped under Jerro's door during a recent road trip. ``I'm so proud you're my coach,'' it read in part.

Jerro had a hard time reading the rest through her tears.

When Jerro found herself in jams - as when the team lost three straight games to fall to 4-4 - she asked herself, ``What would (ASU coach) Maura do?'E'

And so it was that the players, treading water at .500, heard ``the mediocrity speech,'' about not settling for what's out there, about always fighting for more. Not that Jerro needed to borrow the speech from her former coach.

She has, after all, lived it.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, Box

Photo: (1--2--Color) CSUN women's interim basketball coach Frozena Jerro took her team from uncertainty and disarray to the Big Sky title.

Gus Ruelas/Daily News

Box: SCHEDULE