URI’s Jason Francis, rear, battling a Georgia Southern player for a rebound during a game last month, “is the muscle of this team,” says Will Daniels.

AP / Michael Zamora

At 6-foot-9 and 280 pounds, it’s hard for Jason Francis to go unnoticed. Somehow, though, he has come pretty close to doing just that for the last two months.

Francis is the guy who does the dirty work for the URI basketball team. He’s a junior-college transfer who came in with little fanfare, then earned the starting job at center.

Coach Jim Baron will tell anyone who wants to listen that Francis has done what the Rams were hoping he would do. But, on a team with scorers like Will Daniels and Jimmy Baron, with speedy, exciting players like Lamonte Ulmer and Keith Cothran, and with veteran talent like Kahiem Seawright, Parfait Bitee and Joe Mbang, Francis rarely gets the spotlight.

In some ways that is not surprising since he is averaging just 3.2 points and 2.4 rebounds per game.

“People don’t give him as much credit for what he does for us as he deserves,” said Daniels, one of the co-captains. “He clears my guys out. He helps provide offense for me, for Jimmy, for all the guys who like to score. He’s great to have. Without him, we probably wouldn’t be where we are.”

“What I do won’t show up on the stats,” Francis said. “I go out there and try and make all of them better — Jimmy, Will, Ka, Parfait, everybody. I just go out and bang. A lot of people don’t see what I do. They look at the games and see who scores the points. But all that doesn’t count if you don’t have somebody to do the dirty work.”

Francis doesn’t mind doing the dirty work. He’s thrilled to be where he is. He’s from Old Harbour, Jamaica.

“This is a whole lot different for me, yes sir,” Francis said. “I’m from a poor family. My mom worked really hard to keep my family going. My father died when I was 11. He had diabetes. Even when he was around, he couldn’t work. He was sick. It was pretty much all my mom (Pauline). I had to go out there and figure out things on my own a lot.”

Francis, who has two brothers and a sister, played soccer growing up, as just about everyone does back home.

“I didn’t know anything about basketball,” he said. “My last two years in high school my coach, Robert Ramsey, saw me and said I should play basketball. He said, ‘You’re so big, you should play basketball.’ At first he told me, just catch the ball, don’t dribble, just put it in.”

Francis helped his team reach the championship game in Jamaica’s KFC/ISSA National Under-19 championship game. With the help of friends who recruit players to go to the United States, Francis was directed to Southeastern Illinois College, a top junior-college program.

He spent three years there, missing the middle year because of a broken leg. He averaged 6.8 points and 5.5 rebounds last season as his team went 25-6 and reached the title game in its region. Even with the modest numbers, he was much in demand by Division I teams.

“I heard from about 70 schools, schools from all over,” he said. Jim Baron wanted him for URI because he was a perfect fit. The only player the Rams lost from last season was starting forward Darrell Harris. Harris and Francis could not be more different. Where Harris was rail thin, Francis is wide and burly. Where Harris’ best help was with shooting, Francis was at his best patrolling the middle and banging bodies.

The Rhode Island offense has developed so nicely, it did not need another scorer. It needed someone like Francis to provide an inside presence at both ends of the court, someone to protect the interior.

“He’s very aggressive, very physical. He loves contact. He’s a presence,” Baron said. “That’s how he played in junior college. He knows how to use his body. Last year there were times when we got beat up. We needed someone like Jason.”

It helped all the more that even with his bulk Francis can move well enough to keep up with the fast pace at which the Rams play.

“He gets up and down the court pretty well. He moves. He’s very coachable,” Baron said. “He wants to be a success, both on the court and in the classroom.”

Francis, who is majoring in criminal justice, came to URI for a visit last spring. Both sides decided it was a good match.

“When I heard he was coming here to be part of our program, I got very excited,” said Daniels. “I had seen him play when he was here on a recruiting visit. I was thinking to myself, somebody like that in the middle is going to open up our game for everybody else. It has. He’s provided so much spark.

“Jason is the muscle of this team,” Daniels added. “He’s a great person. He’s a great guy. He does what he can do. He doesn’t try to do too much. He’s great to be around.”

The fans might not have noticed him much, but everyone on the team likes having Francis in a Rhody uniform.

pkenyon@projo.com