Duke’s Dereck Lively grew from AAU benchwarmer to top recruit in high school
D
ereck Lively rolled the ball to himself “a million times” in the corner. In his head, he counted down from three.
Lively practiced the same shot over and over again. If it didn’t go in, he shot until it did. So when he took the court for Team Final in the 2021 Peach Jam Final, he was ready.
With the shot clock winding down in the fourth quarter, Lively stood at the baseline watching Otega Oweh drive down the lane. As Oweh tried to put up a floater, the ball was poked away, right into the hands of Lively, who had relocated to the corner. With no hesitation, Lively set his feet. As Brandon Miller sprinted to close out, Lively drained the shot.
On the ensuing play, he rejected Miller at the rim. Then, beating everyone down the floor, Lively finished a lob thrown by Jaheim Bethea to put Team Final up nine, all but sealing the win.
Lively helped Team Final win its first-ever Peach Jam title in 2021. But he wasn’t always the athletic force that he is now. The 7-foot-1 center came a long way from his days as an uncoordinated, lanky, 6-foot-5 eighth grader who couldn’t dunk, said James Johns, former Team Final 17U Coach. Lively sat on the end of the bench to start his AAU career. Five years later, he was the No. 1 player in the country, according to ESPN and a Duke signee, his clutch 3-pointer signifying his growth.
“There were so many moments there where he shined, but I think that was when everybody knew that he arrived,”Johns said. “For him to be willing to take that shot, he didn’t pass it up. It was a big moment.”
Originally from outside of the Philadelphia area, Lively moved to State College when he was younger. Both of Lively’s parents were tall. His dad was 6-foot-9 and his mom, Kathy Drysdale — a 1,000-point scorer at Penn State — was over six-foot as well.
“He was the tallest eighth grader by a foot,” said Rob Brown, the director of Team Final.
Team Final, one of the better AAU programs in the Northeast, boasts over a dozen draft picks in its history with players like Cam Reddish and Lonnie Walker. It didn’t click right away.
“I was in a new setting and very uncomfortable,” Lively said. “I was barely a teenager at that point, and I didn’t have a chance to come out of my shell. I was really timid, and skinny.”
One player Lively looked up to was Jalen Duren. The two were polar opposites. Now a rookie with the Detroit Pistons, Duren was always a far more physical player, “a man amongst boys” in high school, per The Athletic.
Lively was used to his height creating an unreachable advantage, but Duren prevented that. Lively described matching up with Duren as a “learning curve,” as he was often unable to defend against Duren’s burly frame. Rob Brown said that Duren acted as a “big brother” to Lively, challenging him whenever they played, with both of them feeding off each other’s energy. Seeing Duren’s unique brand of dominant play made Lively want to develop his own style.
“Being able to just have a good time with someone off the court, and still be able to know that you’re trying to go at each other like you’re trying to kill each other on the court, was important,” Lively said.
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Playing for Westtown High School, a prep school in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Lively started working on his perimeter skills, becoming less one-dimensional, he said. When the pandemic hit during Lively’s sophomore season, he went back home to Bellefonte where there was nothing he could do but play basketball.
He remembers going to the local YMCA, 10 minutes from his house, challenging himself to make as many shots as possible from beyond the arch. It was at that time where Lively “fell in love with the game,” going to the gym for hours with two of his friends, Jaden Mitchell and Trey Oyler, to play one-on-one.
Mitchell and Oyler were smaller guards, forcing Lively to improve his footwork on defense and work on staying low to keep smaller, quicker players in front.
Not many people had seen Lively over the pandemic, including Duren. The now-NBA player had spent his final year of high school at Montverde Academy in Florida. When Duren came back in March ahead of the AAU season, he had noticed Lively’s progress.
“He matured and was more aggressive, more coordinated and became more explosive,” Johns said. “Going back to eighth grade, we could barely dunk the ball, and now he’s swinging on the rim, confident and smiling and talking on the court. There was a different level of confidence.”
Playing on the EYBL circuit, Lively defended some of the best guards in the country. He said it took “a lot of failure” and “getting embarrassed,” but he didn’t let it impact his mindset.
He said he tries to “embed” his will to not let the other team score into his opponents, so they can feel it.
Lively studied great shot blockers like Hakeem Olajuwon, Anthony Davis, Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley. He looked at the details of how they blocked shots, focusing on how they defended off the ball, shifting from the weak side to help.
After struggling with a calf injury just before his first collegiate season with the Blue Devils, along with getting the flu and losing over 15 pounds, it took him time to get used to the physicality of the college game. Similar to his trajectory in high school, things didn’t click instantly.
During his debut in the Tobacco Road rivalry game against North Carolina, Lively made his presence felt. He finished with just four points, but had 13 rebounds and eight blocks — the most ever in a game between the two teams, leading Duke to a 63-57 win.
“It was having a will to just not back down and throw the first punch,” Lively said.
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In his last season playing AAU ball, Lively averaged 8.4 points, 6.7 rebounds and 3.7 blocks per game on the EYBL circuit. He didn’t score 20-25 points per game like other top prospects, but played within his role to attract the notice of scouts and coaches. After the summer, Lively skyrocketed up the recruiting rankings, becoming a consensus top-five player in the 2022 class. With nearly two dozen schools offering him a scholarship, Lively chose Duke over other blue bloods like Kentucky and UNC.
He’d come a long way from the kid who was uncoordinated and skinny in middle school. He was now a potential one-and-done first-round pick.
“We always thought he would be good, but as he kept rising up and he started performing, it got to the point where we were like, Derek’s the one,” Johns said. “Early on, you had no clue and then that last year…the light bulb went off.”
Photograph courtesy of Duke Athletics