The forgotten coach that NBA prospects can’t stop calling
Joey Burton deserves another shot in college basketball.
Let me begin by saying that Burton doesn’t fit the mold of a 2018 basketball guru. The hoodie-wearing, bulky fullback-looking, unshaven father of four is not going to fit into the Jay Wright collection and is certainly not in the market for a Gillette sponsorship.
On top of this, his basketball playing career ended at a tiny college that his current clients have never heard of.
So how did a star-studded lineup of NBA prospects find his one court tucked away in a Pike Township industrial park?
“If you told me five years ago this was going to lead to working with a Kelan Martin, Dakota Mathias, Carsen Edwards, Trevon Bluiett, Yogi Ferrell and Glenn Robinson III, I would not have believed it,” Burton said.
Left without a job after five years as an assistant on the women’s staff at Mississippi State, Joey and his wife, LeLe, moved their family to Indianapolis. That was a big move. For many reasons.
Burton had spoke with then-Park Tudor head coach and former longtime assistant of John Calipari, Ed Schilling, who guaranteed a spot as an instructor at his skills academy.
At home, the Burton family was praying dad found a home among the hoops-crazed Hoosiers.
“I spent several months questioning my future as a basketball coach,” Burton said. “I was really in doubt.”
Second rough break: Schilling leaves for UCLA to team up with Steve Alford. Burton, a native of Arizona, with not even a whiff of the street credit Schilling owns around the state (and the country for that matter), takes over the Champions Academy.
Champions Academy, now run by a guy who played at the Moody Bible Institute on Chicago’s northwest side, who’s basketball mountain-top moment was holding a practice for the Dream Team in the early 1990’s. Got it.
But then, something dreamlike did happen. Burton got a nickname.
“After working out Yogi Ferrell one night, I went home and had 20 notifications on Twitter,” Burton said. “I look it up and it is Yogi (Ferrell) saying ‘I am going to call Joey the shot doctor.’”
Burton does not market himself as some sort of a magic man. He does not even refer to himself as a shot doctor. He can ignore it as long as he wants, but the case is mounting.
“Oh, yeah, I can call him the ‘shot doc’ because he fixed my shot a lot since sophomore year,” Butler’s second all-time leading scorer Kelan Martin said.
You see, Burton is old school. He didn’t go from begging any youth player with a basketball in central Indiana to work with him to coaching this caliber of NBA talent by doing anything fancy.
It turns out the shot doctor has another PhD: people skills.
“I didn’t care about their name,” Burton said. “If they were serious about wanting to get help and wanting to get better. I poured my all into them and that is what I continue to do.”
Sometimes the ball does bounce the right way … for the right people.