It’s a brand new (basketball) world for Myers Park standout Jerin Truesdale

Barbara Nelson prefers Jerin Truesdale 2.0 to the original version.

“But she had to do a lot of work to get here,” Nelson, coach of the Myers Park girls’ basketball team, said of her team’s leading scorer and rebounder.

More than a few opponents were taken aback earlier this season when they saw Truesdale get the ball and take a 12-foot jump shot, rather than make a post move, with her back to the basket, and shoot from short range.

“She has totally changed positions,” Nelson said of Truesdale, who will lead the fourth-seeded Mustangs (25-2) against 13th-seeded Porter Ridge (20-6) in a second-round 4A state playoff game Friday night at Myers Park.

Truesdale, a 5-foot-10 senior, was a standout center-forward as a sophomore and junior, piling up points and rebounds from near the basket. But in the offseason, she and Nelson, who has coached nine state championship teams and has nearly 800 career victories, decided that Truesdale needed a change.

“We knew she could do more,” Nelson said.

So the offseason was spent teaching Truesdale to play guard, too.

“We worked on ball-handling skills, the mid-range game, things like that,” said Myers Park assistant coach Kyree Bethel, who has worked with a number of young players as a teacher. “There were a lot of things to learn, but she worked very hard at it.”

“It was challenging,” Truesdale said. “I had to reinvent myself, in a way.”

She had a workout with a traveling Australian women’s team and said she learned some new skills from that experience.

Truesdale still works efficiently near the basket, averaging a team-high 8.3 rebounds a game. But about half her shots are from mid-range, and she is averaging 45 percent from the floor this year, scoring 14.3 points a contest.

“I felt like I always had guard skills,” Truesdale said. “But until this season, I played mostly with my back to the basket. It took a lot of work to make the change, and I’m still learning.”

She also is averaging 3.1 assists and 2.3 steals a game, most of those taking place away from the basket. Tuesday, in the first round of the playoffs, Truesdale scored her 1,000th career point. She also has more than 500 career rebounds.

College programs are noticing, as Truesdale has a number of Division II offers. Nelson thinks some Division I programs will be knocking on the door eventually.

“I’m proud of her,” Nelson said. “Not everyone would be willing to make the change.”

Truesdale, who has scored in double figures in all but two of the Mustangs’ contests, said teammates have learned to appreciate her new skills.

“My coaches and teammates trust that I’ll make the right play,” she said.

Truesdale’s type of game works perfectly with the kind of team Myers Park has on the floor this season, Nelson said.

“They play hard, and they do a nice job of sharing the ball,” she said. “They never talk about anything other than right is in front of them. Jerin is a big part of that.”

Nelson said the bond she has with Truesdale “is different.”

“We’ve been there to back each other up, when we needed it,” Nelson said. “Jerin is a special kind of person.”

Truesdale, who enjoys drawing and playing flag football in her free time, said she is enjoying this last trip as a high school player.

“We’ve done a lot, but we have more goals ahead of us,” she said. “I feel like there is so much we can do.”