Former NBA Player, Luke Zeller, Uses HomeCourt to Bring Professional Training to his Hometown
In Bloomington, Indiana, the Zeller family is renowned in the basketball community. Luke, Tyler, and Cody Zeller all played at the Division 1 level and in the NBA.
Zeller said their dad would pepper coaches with unique questions, “[my dad would ask questions like what’s missing in college basketball today or what’s the differentiator and who you recruit and the resulting answer for these college coaches was character.”
With Tyler (San Antonio Spurs) and Cody (Charlotte Hornets) still playing professionally, Luke has found a way to give back to his hometown using HomeCourt.
“HomeCourt probably got us three years ahead of where we would have been without it. We learned things this year, as far as how to develop and improve relationships with our kids and engage them during the week” — Luke Zeller
For Luke, the President and founder of DistinXion, his idea of what he would be doing after retiring began back to his time at Notre Dame. While taking a business class, he came up with what would eventually turn into DistinXion. This basketball organization presents an all-in-one development process that focuses on improving character and basketball skills.
The lessons learned from growing up in Southern Indiana and attending church camps, academic competitions, basketball camps, and marketing competitions in the Summer, Luke thought he could find a way to combine them. So he “started a business plan and started working in that direction of everything we’ve learned from kind of Midwest small-town values,” Zeller said.
“For me to be able to see kids working out of their driveway, working out in the garage, a couple of parents put concrete in their basement, one cleared out their horse barn and made into a gym.”
DistinXion focuses on the mind, body, and spirit, Zeller said, “our mission [is to teach] character and leadership [to our players].” Something that differentiates them for other programs is the “Champions” sessions they hold that Zeller says deal with “elements of character, honesty, attitude, motivation, and perseverance.”
Typically, DistinXion holds eight or nine camps a year on top of putting together boys and girls teams that compete in tournaments. Yet, with the national health crisis brought on by the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, the normal would not work anymore.
“Our mission has not changed because of COVID-19, but our avenue that we’re going to do it in is going to change drastically.”
Ray Cagle, COO of DistinXion, was an early adopter of HomeCourt. As someone who spent most of his life working in technology, Cagle was intrigued by the notion of an interactive workout and began using it immediately.
Part of the reason that DistinXion turned to HomeCourt during the lockdown is that it was already something they had planned on incorporating into their program.
DistinXion had their own “Core 5” — shooting, dribbling, etc. — initiative that would ask players to track their stats by hand. These were like homework assignments for the kids to complete during the week and then report back to their coaches each week.
However, with everyone quarantined they needed a new way to track and communicate these things, “we had stuff we wanted them to do but tracking the basketball activities in between [sessions] was a challenge and we [had already planned] to use HomeCourt to help us,” Cagle said. Instead of starting from scratch in the face of the pandemic, Cagle said, “we understood our mission hadn’t changed, so we challenged ourselves we created daily material for them to complete on HomeCourt.”
“There are multiple families we reached out to and stayed connected with in the middle of global pandemic thanks to HomeCourt.” — Luke Zeller
Throughout the Spring, DistinXion wasn’t focused solely on figuring out how to adjust to the unusual circumstances; they wanted to find a way to use the new additions for the present and the future. “I talked about with every decision we made it was not going to replace what we were doing,” Zeller said, “everything we did in 2020 we’re going to add on to what we were already doing. We didn’t go through and say, ‘well, because of COVID-19, we’re going to do this’.”
This approach is best displayed by the program’s “Make it Better” mantra. Zeller spoke about how they bring this saying to life at tournaments, “from the beginning of our program we decided you know we’re at these AAU tournaments, where they just rotate teams in and out when your games are done another group comes in, well the bench areas get pretty messy. People leave water bottles and Gatorade bottles, so we just decided that if a DistinXion team came by, everything got cleaned up at that bench area. It didn’t matter if it was ours or if it was left before we were going to make it better.”
Cagle added, “when you look at where HomeCourt, they’re not creating basketball, they’re not creating basketball drills, they’re creating opportunities to measure and produce feedback.”
While additions like the in-app leaderboard that ranks players based on their performances are great tools at driving competition, it can sometimes result in unforeseen consequences with development. Cagle said that Zeller noticed this happening within DistinXion, “we saw that happen with a lot of our kids.” Together, they found a way to make it better, Cagle added, “HomeCourt makes it really easy to see, here’s the time that I had yesterday on this drill and this is my best time on that drill, [then my goal for today is to] beat it…and I thought that was a nice change of direction or change of focus that Luke made early on in our utilization of HomeCourt.”
“What I’ve been most impress with about HomeCourt is that like our Make It Better Standard, HomeCourt does a good job of doing the same.” — Ray Cagle, Chief Operating Officer
Zeller referenced legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, “they have that opportunity [through HomeCourt] to be able to drive towards that John Wooden definition of success, where success is a direct result of doing it the best that you can do. [It is a] direct result of doing the best not compared to everybody else, but knowing you did the best that you were capable of doing, and that’s different for everybody.”
Building a relationship with a player is a vital part of helping them improve. In DistinXion’s view, as Zeller said, “there’s got to be an element of trust, an element of respect, an element of compassion, and an element of stability to give players.”
Similarly, HomeCourt has many elements within the app designed to ensure that practice and working out are more fun and engaging, Cagle said, “through those tools [HomeCourt] can accelerate [a player’s] development.”
“ A player might not have a gym to go to, but they got a phone, and they prop their phone up and use the HomeCourt app anywhere.” — Ray Cagle
While developing their players is priority number one, both Cagle and Zeller have noticed that, like their players, HomeCourt has experienced growth and development over time.
Zeller mentioned how HomeCourt has been able to continually change over time, “what I’m most impressed with is if you look at the trajectory, if I was if I was ranking HomeCourt on an on a talent map, they’ve gotten better in the last six months, and I think they’ll get better in the next six months.”
Cagle brought up the importance of being patient upon first use, “anybody that is new to implementing HomeCourt for teams would suggest you know the patient early,” he went on to say, “they keep making improvements they keep making it better, [HomeCourt] will keep getting easier and easier to use.”
As it becomes more natural, it leads to players using it more, and Zeller said, “they work out every single day and be able to give feedback at the end of that day, or what they did for the next day they can work on it next week and that 1% Improvement and that feedback loop starts to change.”
“Whatever it looks like on the other side of this, I think HomeCourt will greatly benefit DistinXion for our development and greatly benefit players that will utilize it for the aspect of that regular feedback. — Luke Zeller
Zeller said DistinXion would continue to actively use HomeCourt, “HomeCourt will still be a really big part of what we do with our teams even once we get back to the normal to where we can get everybody together in the gym and practice [HomeCourt] is still going to fill in that gap of self-improvement for the individual players.”
What started as a family hobby has now turned into an organization molding Southern Indiana youth through basketball. DistinXion is taking a different approach to developing the next generation, and they’ve partnered with HomeCourt in hopes of taking that approach to the next level.
