In August, Northridge Prep head basketball coach Will Rey sat down with John on the Beyond The Game podcast for a fifty-minute conversation. If you have a son in the Jr Knights program, or you are weighing whether to enroll him, it is worth your time.
We are not going to summarize the whole thing. But a few moments matter for anyone trying to understand what this program is built on.
He Chose to Come Back
Coach Rey was a Division I head coach at Loyola University Chicago. When that ended in 1994, a mentor handed him a book called Make the Big Time Where You Are, written by a football coach named Frosty Westering. The message was simple: if you are coaching for the right reasons, the level does not matter. What matters is the impact you have on the people in front of you.
It took him ten years to act on it. In 2004 he took the job at Northridge Prep, and people asked why he had not gone after a bigger school with a bigger gym.
His answer on the podcast: he found the greatest personal and professional fulfillment in the least likely of places.
He is now starting his twenty-fourth season. More than a hundred seniors have come through the program.
Winning Matters, and It Is Not the Point
Coach Rey is direct about this in a way that is refreshing. He does not pretend winning is unimportant. His teams prepare to win, they scout, they practice hard, and he makes no apologies for it. He is blunt that anyone who claims otherwise after all that work is probably not telling you the truth.
But the process is what he actually teaches. His players are going to become lawyers, doctors, teachers, police officers, businessmen. The steps involved in preparing a team to compete are the same steps those careers demand: plan, prepare, execute, hold each other accountable. Learning that at fifteen is the point. The trophy is a byproduct.
This is the same reason the Jr Knights run a two-to-one practice-to-game ratio while other programs chase tournament schedules.
What Today's Players Need
The segment that stopped us was around the twenty-seven minute mark, where he is asked how players have changed.
His answer, unprompted: fundamentally they have not. The thing that motivated a fifteen-year-old in 1975 motivates a fifteen-year-old today. What has changed is the resources available. He lists them one by one. Strength training. Speed and agility. The mental side, sports psychology. He mentions he is bringing a nutritionist in to speak to his varsity team this season.
He also notes what he did not have. When he was coaching at Gordon Tech, conditioning meant running laps around Horner Park. There was no strength program to speak of and nobody to talk to about the mental side of not playing.
We built the Jr Knights around that list before we heard him say it. Skills sessions with dedicated trainers. Speed and agility work with a coach who spent six years as an NBA head strength coach. Weekly mental performance sessions. It was reassuring to hear the varsity coach describe the same program from the other end of it.
Coaching for Character
Asked what "beyond the game" means to him, Coach Rey said it walks in step with the phrase he has adopted for his own program: coach for character.
He talked about the disappointment of meeting coaches who reach the end of a long career and find an emptiness there, because the scoreboard was the whole thing. What defines a coach, in his view, is the relationships and the impact on people. He measures it in former players who come back on alumni night before the Thanksgiving tournament, pushing strollers, wanting their wives to meet their old coach.
He calls those the paychecks you get in coaching.
Why This Matters for a Feeder Program
Near the end, he said something that is essentially the argument for why the Jr Knights exist. The day is going to come when he is no longer the coach at Northridge, and the goal is to build the program so that it continues long after everyone currently involved is gone.
That is what a feeder program is for. Not to produce a fifth-grade championship. To make sure that when a boy walks into the Northridge gym as a freshman, he already knows what is expected of him and how this program does things.
Our skills sessions run in that gym, with that coach. That is not a marketing line. It is the whole design.
The full episode is available on the Beyond The Game with John and Carlton channel on YouTube. Our thanks to John for the conversation, and to Coach Rey for saying out loud what a lot of us have been trying to put into words.