Julian Gorens is a basketball lifer.
The 52-year-old Lanphier High School assistant basketball coach literally lives and breathes the sport and his Nike basketball camp displays his drive for teaching the game to the youth and current players.
The five-day co-ed camp — with ages ranging from 7-18 — begins on Monday, July 20, and runs through Friday, July 24, at Lober-Nika Gymnasium. The days begin at 9 a.m. and end at 3 p.m. from Monday through Thursday. On Friday, the camp concludes from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
It marks Gorens’ sixth year of being the head man and the third year that it will be held at Lanphier. Gorens said he took over the camp in 2019 and it was held at Springfield High for one year before moving to the Salvation Army for two years.
“It’s a pretty good thing, man. I like it a lot,” Gorens said. “We’re not just coming there and putting up shots and sending people home. Everything is really on a professional level on how the NBA and WNBA do things. The camp focuses more on strength and conditioning and is focused on the overall game. I see a lot of people — they love the game, but they don’t know how to really go about it on making a kid successful.”
Gorens stressed there will be a workout regimen during the morning with resistance training and nutritional habits, while the afternoon session will concentrate on skill sets with shooting, passing and rebounding. The five-day cost for the camp is $410 and participants can register at www.ussportscamps.com and click on the Lanphier High School link.
“At the end of the day, we do competitions, so everything that you have learned for that day, we need you to apply it in the game,” Gorens said. “We make tournaments out of it and that’s where we make it fun. We believe out of doing those things for four to five days, you can learn some things on how to become a better and complete player.”
Gorens noted that local and nationwide talent will stop through the camp to speak with the campers. He noted that through the years, Lanphier greats Ed Horton and Larry Austin Jr. have appeared, including University of Illinois basketball alum Sergio McClain. Southeast graduate and former WNBA player Alex Harden has contributed, and Linda Shanklin, the mother of Lanphier grad and former NBA pro Andre Iguodala, “has been awesome,” Gorens said.
He added that community leaders will also be in attendance.
“I didn’t have these types of things when I was a kid,” Gorens said. “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth growing up. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that life, but it didn’t take me away from the sport. It made me a stronger man that I am today, which kept me humble. I trained with a lot of people that knew the sport and in the sport. It kept me off the streets and I wish we had a Nike national tournament, something like that I am running.”
Where it all began
Gorens, a Springfield native, went to Carl Sandburg and Iles Elementary School. He won a state basketball championship at Franklin Middle School and became a major cog in Springfield’s run to a Class AA sectional title in the 1992-93 season during his senior year under then-coach Clark Barnes.
His basketball days continued at Wabash Valley Junior College and NCAA Division II Arkansas Tech University. After recovering from an injury, he signed with a sports agency. He played basketball overseas in Oslo, Norway and Germany, and had NBA tryouts with the Chicago Bulls, Phoenix Suns and Philadelphia 76ers.
Once returning to Springfield, his coaching career started at Franklin for two years before reuniting with Springfield High for 15 years. He is in his third year as an assistant with Lanphier head coach Blake Turner, who has known Gorens for years dating back to the neighborhoods between Brown Street and Lawrence Avenue.
“When (Springfield High) had a staff change, I reached out to Julian to come out and (coach) with me just because I knew his love of basketball was something that I wanted in my program,” Turner said. “He holds those kids to a standard and he’s a no-nonsense guy.”
Turner, a 1994 Lanphier graduate, reflected on the days that he and Gorens competed from grade school and throughout high school, and he still enjoys the back-and-forth banter that happens from time-to-time.
“We were rivals and even though he’s on my staff, we still have those rival talks from back in the 90s,” Turner said. “He was part of some great teams with Tyron Lee and Shelby Roberson and those guys. I was part of some great teams with Jeff Walker and Victor Chukwudebe, so we had some good battles back in the day.”
“They went deep (in the 1993 postseason), and we beat them at City that year,” Turner poked, which resulted in a Springfield-Southeast tie for the tournament title. “We upset them and it was just one of those things.”
Still grinding
Astonishingly, Gorens still laces up the shoes and plays basketball at the semi-pro level and claims, “I always let my game do my talking.” He has also worked for Feldco, a window and siding company, for the past eight years.
“He’s 52 and whatever and still out there playing with 18- and 19-year-olds in leagues, and still going 100 percent,” Turner said. “You can look at his body and tell that he’s in there and still active. You want somebody like that on your staff because the kids see that and they understand the love of the game and what it means to him. He’s always a voice and soundboard, and always someone you can count on to be there at any basketball event. His love for the game just permeates throughout the community.”
And that connection, Gorens said, is his top priority.
“The focus is not so much about myself — it’s about this being a Nike national basketball camp,” he said. “This goes across the country. This isn’t just Julian Gorens. You can go to New York, Chicago, St. Louis or Atlanta. This is huge because you will get a lot of people from various cities and towns coming to the camps.”
This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: What makes this Nike basketball camp a top attraction in Springfield
Reporting by Trevor Lawrence, Springfield State Journal-Register / State Journal-Register
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By Trevor Lawrence, Springfield State Journal-Register | USA TODAY Network
