Walkup Watch: Getting into a New Routine
5/7/2016 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
SFAJacks.com caught up with 2015-16 men's basketball senior Thomas Walkup as he continues to pursue his dream of playing basketball professionally. Here's the first entry in our Walkup Watch series as told to us by Thomas.
In the middle of April, I was selected as one of 64 seniors from around the nation to participate in the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament in Portsmouth, Va. This tournament showcases the nation’s best seniors and they are divided up into eight teams. It was a really good experience to play basketball with a lot of other talented guys and to put our stuff on display in front of many pro scouts. The team I was on ended up winning the tournament and once that ended on Saturday, April 16, I flew back on Sunday to rest up for a few days before taking the next step of my journey.
That following Tuesday – April 19 – I headed out to Phoenix, Ariz., to start training. When I’m training, a basic day for me starts by waking up early so I can get to the gym by 9:00 a.m. and start lifting weights. After my weights session, I get out on the court and work on basketball skills – ball handling, pick and roll stuff, and a little bit of shooting here and there. That takes about an hour-and-a-half and then I’ll go grab some lunch or maybe a smoothie before I head back to the gym and shoot for a couple of hours. That’s the makeup of a regular day.
As of late, I got a couple of calls from the NBA’s Boston Celtics and Utah Jazz and I was lucky enough to go work out for them which I was very excited about. Opportunities like that are what I have been working toward for a long time. To get to go work out for a pair of NBA teams is such a blessing, and on May 2 I flew to Boston.
I landed in Boston around 10 p.m. or so, and the next morning I woke up, ate some breakfast and met some team representatives to go through my first round of testing. Every team wants to get their own numbers on you such as height, weight, reach, vertical jump and while some teams will do more testing than others, for Boston it was pretty simple. From there, three other guys and I got out on the court and got after it. We played a lot of one-on-one and two-on-two, did a little bit of shooting and finished things up with a big conditioning test. It was a very tiring workout but also a very good one. Each team wants to see how you perform when you’re tired and how potential players transition from a 40-minute game to a 48-minute one. After I finished up with the Celtics, I jumped on a plane again and started a journey of over 2,300 miles to Salt Lake City so I could work out for the Jazz.
On May 4, I woke up in Salt Lake City and got a little workout in at the Jazz facility before my official workout on May 5. That workout featured a group of six guys, so it was a little bigger than what I went through in Boston. Earlier I mentioned that some teams did more testing than others, and the Jazz are one of those teams who runs you through a bigger battery of tests. They conducted a 185-pound bench press test to see how many repetitions I could do as well as a bunch of things you’d see at the NBA combine. Once our group got out onto the court, we did a couple of one-on-one drills then dove right into three-on-three before doing a lot more shooting. It was a lot of fun and a really exciting time for me to take these first steps into potentially making some of my dreams come true.
My agent has told me I have a few more things coming up soon, so I’m just waiting to see where he tells me to go. These are exciting times for me, but there's no way I would be where I am without my friends, teammates and everyone who supported us at Stephen F. Austin. I will always remember my time as a Lumberjack and all the packed houses in Nacogdoches and around the United States. I'll check in with you again, 'Jack nation, once I know where my next step takes me.
-SFA-
