Jason Delaney has no shortage of CJ Walker stories.
There’s that time many years ago when, as the boy’s basketball coach of Indiana’s Arsenal Tech, he went to an eighth-grade game in his school’s district to see eventual Xavier stud Paul Scruggs but came away wanting to know more about the point guard whose mother he happened to sit next to. He still remembers when Walker told him he planned to attend the high school at which he coached, and he can think back to when he saw the then-middle-schooler win an AAU game by taking a charge.
“And right there, you just knew that kid's a winner, that kid's a champion,” Delaney said this week. “It carried right on to high school, and it's carried him ever since.”
Delaney tells the tale of when Arsenal Tech met the famed Huntington Prep for a game broadcasted on ESPN in 2013, when Walker was just a sophomore. They were going up against a loaded squad with Washington Wizards center Thomas Bryant, Charlotte Hornets forward Miles Bridges, former Buckeye JaQuan Lyle and Gonzaga’s Josh Perkins littering the roster. Walker wasn’t the star of his own team at the time – San Antonio Spurs forward Trey Lyles had that designation – but he was the engine who propelled the Indianapolis public school to a 78-70 victory over the heralded prep school after his head coach laid into him after a turnover.
The memories of Walker’s time at Arsenal Tech extend well beyond the playing surface for Delaney. He won’t forget the time when, as one of the high school’s grading period neared its end, several players on the team weren’t getting their work done in the classroom. Walker gave what his former coach recalls as a “passionate speech” about how they needed “because he cared so much.”
“If he's going to sacrifice and do the stuff, then you should be doing that in return,” Delaney said. “Just like his coach. That's coach qualities.”
Talking to Delaney, you get the sense that he could go on for hours about Walker. After all, he gives Ohio State’s redshirt senior point guard the ultimate compliment.
Delaney, who’s now at Cathedral High School in Indianapolis and coaches Indy Heat 17U in the Nike EYBL, calls Walker the best leader he has ever coached. He does so without equivocation, making the decree as if to state it as fact. He has said that to head coach Chris Holtmann plenty of times, and the three years Walker has been a Buckeye have done nothing to dissuade him in that belief. These days, Holtmann tells people – like those in the Schottenstein Center hearing his Senior Day speech a couple of weeks ago – that Walker “defines everything we want a leader in our program to be about.”
The messages Delaney and Holtmann espouse about Walker, along with what Delaney says he used to hear from Florida State’s coaches, all center around a central theme: Walker’s has natural leadership characteristics and tendencies. To put it differently, coaches love Walker because he is one of them.
He’s a coach on the floor. He’s a coach off of the court. And someday down the line, he’ll be a coach where they stand.
“He came on to our Zoom call for Cathedral during the quarantine and talked about leadership to our team,” Delaney said. “We talked afterward about one day he wants to be a coach after his playing days are done. For me, that's just the natural thing for him because he's got so much knowledge and so much to give back that coaching would be the perfect profession to him. I think he'd be outstanding at it.”
Holtmann, quite effusively, agrees.
In fact, even in the lead-up to the 2019-20 season, he made the exact same claim. At that point, all Walker had done was run the scout team while sitting out a year after transferring from Florida State, but he had made quite the impression on his new head coach.
“I think he’s a coach in the making,” Holtmann said in September 2019 at Big Ten media day.
Walker, whenever his time as a player comes to an end, wants to jump into the profession. He sees himself as somebody people gravitate toward, as a dependable and trustworthy person and as a lifelong point guard with decades of experience spent learning the game. Because of that, he believes he'll at some point find a home in the coaching world. Initially, he thinks he’d fit in as a head assistant somewhere, or as somebody like Jake Diebler who’s heavily involved in player development and scouting.
Again and again, Holtmann has touted those traits. He called Walker the team's fourth assistant coach in January when Walker’s torn ligaments in his right hand sidelined him for a few games, referring to him as 2-0 as a coach after his second win on the bench. He sees his point guard as this team’s leader – both vocally and by example – who has the respect of everybody within the program. He trusts the ever-competitive Walker to retain everything he reads in scouting reports and out-hustle opponents.
All of that – not the 9.4 points per game or 4.4-to-2 assist-to-turnover ratio he has recorded this season – is what Walker hopes to have left behind in Columbus once his career wraps up after the upcoming NCAA tournament.
“I just hope that people remember me as a leader, sacrifice myself for the team, for the coaching staff and the university,” Walker said recently. “I take it seriously playing for Ohio State. It means a lot. I've met a lot of people since I've been here that helped me get where I am today. I just want them to remember me playing hard, putting my team first, diving on the floor, all the little things people don't really mark in the box score. I just want to be remembered as that. Just being that ultimate leader and a great overall point guard that wins and get the job done each and every night.”
That, of course, is the legacy he already left years ago in the halls of Arsenal Tech, where he was named the 2016 Indianapolis Player of the Year.
“The heart that he plays with is unmatched,” Delaney said. “When you see the way that he has that fire and passion about him, you try to find players that match that. Ever since CJ Walker, I'm trying to find a guy like him. He just has such an impact on a program that you are constantly searching for a guy like him.”
Ohio State has that exact guy right now, and it’s going after a national championship by putting the ball in his hands.
Walker's days as a coach, while coming eventually, haven’t arrived yet. There’s more to be done as a Buckeye, and for the 23-year-old, the March Madness run will begin in the first round on Friday afternoon.
