LA CROSSE — Jordan Davis has established his name in the world of professional basketball, and he hopes that’s enough to allow his career to continue.
Davis has been home in La Crosse this summer after spending more than three months playing for a team in Serbia, and he talked about his hopeful future during a break between sessions of the Davis Brothers Basketball Camp at Central High School on Monday.
“I got my foot in the door now,” he said of the path overseas. “They know who I am, and they have film on me. I feel like it’s a matter of where and when.”
So the Central graduate has been training like he already has a job in workouts with his brother Johnny and Aquinas grad Lexi Donarski several times per week as he awaits that call.
That contact could come anytime and allow him a matter of days to travel to his next basketball home after the first tenure with KK Mega Basket.
A guard who played his college career at Wisconsin and Illinois State, Davis received his first call and packed up for Belgrade in February. He returned home in May.
“I didn’t know if I was going to play basketball again professionally,” he said between sessions of Monday’s first day of camp. “I was lucky enough to get on a team — a very good and well-known team in Europe — and it was fun to play games in places like Russia, Montenegro, Croatia.”
The team’s base was in the capital city of Belgrade, and Davis said he was the oldest player on the team at 23 years old — he is now 24 — and was treated accordingly by teammates who were trying to carve out college paths to the United States.
“They called me Grandpa and Unc,” Davis said with a smile. “But I’ve also seen a lot more basketball than they have, so they were asking me questions, and I was happy to help them out.”
Davis said teammates from that roster are on their way to play for Syracuse, Butler and North Carolina. A return to that team is possible, he said, but it does focus on younger players.
That leaves the rest of Europe as a possibility for Davis, a 6-4 guard who started some games and hardly played in others. The philosophy of playing time is a more businesslike approach — perhaps a developmental approach — and gives everyone chances for time on the court.
Davis played eight games after arriving late in the season and played more than 20 minutes in two of them. He had an 11-point game and finished with 25 points and 10 rebounds.
The workouts with his brother and Donarski are part of the return preparation.
“We’ve been doing weight training at the Onalaska YMCA three days a week,” Davis said. “Before that will be some light shooting for an hour-and-a-half, and after it we will go live or into some more shooting.”
Different focuses on the weight aspect change the basketball approach, but the workouts are built for professional athletes. Davis was able to provide the reassurance that he belongs in that category with the stint in Serbia.
“I feel like the way they played really fit my game over there,” said Davis, who added that the biggest basketball adjustment he faced was the use of a 24-second clock. “It’s fast-paced. I like to run the floor and showed what I can do.”
