![]() ![]() Being a son of a coach, playing on his AAU teams, his high school team and his college team and his pro teams. Gates said because Joyce was a point guard, he’s been “an extension of a coach for a looooooong period of time. “Our president and our athletic director, when we were able to hire coach Joyce there were a lot of high fives,” Gates said Feb. Gates saw it as a “home run hire” for Cleveland State, which opens play in the Horizon League tournament on Tuesday. Ignatius High School, when Cameron was an assistant video coordinator at Florida and Gates was an assistant at Florida State. Gates got to know Joyce’s brother Cameron, in his first season as boys basketball coach at St. ![]() Gates said he met James and Joyce in the summer of 1999 - “We didn‘t know LeBron was LeBron” - when Dambrot brought them to Cal. Gates played at Cal-Berkeley for coach Ben Braun, who hired Dambrot as an assistant at Eastern Michigan in 1986. There were common threads that led Joyce to Cleveland State. I wasn’t going to allow myself to fail from being scared or not being ready. I was ready to tackle anything new and go after it with all that I could. In my mind I didn’t let myself be unprepared. There’s probably former head coaches that would have said, ‘I’ll take that position.’ There’s some resumes that are going to look better than mine. Maybe a calculated risk, but it’s still a risk. “For coach to believe in me and trust that he could take this guy away from playing and integrate him into the staff and that I’m capable - I hope he says that I’m capable - of doing the job, that’s a risk. “I’m very fortunate and extremely blessed,” Joyce said. Joyce knows how fortunate he was to start at a Division I program, to have Gates take a chance on him even though he had no prior experience. It’s the tough part, but it brings all the joy in the end.” It’s not what happens at the end, it’s whatever you did day in and day out that got you there, that’s the fun part. It’s the journey that you go on that’s the most important. “I always go back through my playing, it’s the relationships that matter. “To have that same chance to affect someone’s life and just the relationships,” Joyce said. Inspired by the influence his dad had as a youth minister and the impact his father and Dambrot made on him as coaches, Joyce set out to mold young men through basketball. I know there’s people that go through it. ![]() “It’s tough to wake up and do something that you just don’t want to do. I knew I could wake up every day and be proud that I’m doing it, want to do it,” Joyce said. “I was locked in I knew this is what I wanted. Joyce had considered and discarded other avenues in his sport. But he’d watched his father compartmentalize, putting basketball aside to focus on his wife and children when he came home. He knew about the long hours and frequent moves. I don’t doubt that it will happen for him, for sure.” “From way back as a young kid, we weren’t afraid to take a risk. “That’s kind of how we’ve always looked at things,” the elder Joyce said by phone on Feb. After all, Little Dru and James played for an AAU team called the Shooting Stars. His father was not surprised by his son’s lofty goals. “It’s just something that I’ve envisioned and with due time and opportunity if it happens, I hope I get a chance to live it out and see what I can do.” Call me crazy, I’ll be crazy,” Joyce said. “There’s nothing wrong with shooting for it at all. Hall of Famer Brown is the only coach to achieve that feat, winning an NCAA Division I title at Kansas in 1988 and an NBA championship with the Detroit Pistons in 2004. Joyce was correct on his historical reference. If I’m not mistaken, I’ve got to check the history, I want to say Larry Brown came close, I don’t know if he did professionally.” “I don’t know how many people have done that. ![]()
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