Meet Troy Stevenson

The Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC) basketball program attracts guard prospects for multiple reasons with one in particular standing out: much more often than not, Bear Cub backcourters possess a DI basketball address once they depart.

Coach Craig McMillan has a long lineage of such, most recently consisting of Sama Taku at Pacific, Kevin Aronis with New Mexico State and Bobby Sharp residing in Portland.

But one of the secrets behind this success is Troy Stevenson, who wear many hats at SRJC including one in the classroom and another as recruiting coordinator, but also works with Bear Cub backcourters on honing their shooting prowess.

The facts: SRJC has attempted 591 attempts beyond the arc thus far this season, the most in the Big 8 Conference and possesses a 42.1 connection rate which is also best in the league.

Stevenson, who played at Montgomery High and at Santa Rosa JC, owns Master's Degrees from Howard University and USF and is a member of the SRJC counseling staff as well as an instructor in the Communications Studies Department there.

He is the first to acknowledge this aim-fire-connect prowess is not all his doing.

"Good shooters have had good coaches along the way in high school and CYO ball," he said, adding, "we've had a lot of good clay to mold."

But with shooting at a premium, what does he add to the mix?

"Drills and repetition, with a variety so the guys don't get tired of it. It's muscle memory."

Stevenson calls shooting "a confidence game" offering the famously funny with a grain of truth line "a hot shooter shoots until he cold and a cold shooter shoots until he's hot."

He also believes using a group setting "because it helps guys get mental toughness." The drills last long enough for a degree of fatigue to set in "as that is what players will face during games. We also work on drills that will get you open" which is too often a lost art.

Another element important to Stevenson and coaching overall is knowing your guys and working with them. For example, who get fired up and who needs firing up? Or if a play is drawn up real quick, figuring out who will get it and who will need to hear it again? "A good coach keeps all that in mind," according to Stevenson who recalled a time during his playing days explaining to a 6-foot-8 teammate what he needed to do on a certain play after the original instructions were issued.

In response to the topic about how highlights too often override the fundamentals, Stevenson called it "the ESPN Sports Center effect. What about the guy who set a back screen to get his teammate open? Or the guy who blocked out his opponent on every play?"

So what was the genesis of all this basketball involvement?

"In the third grade, one of my neighbors was going to a basketball camp at Santa Rosa Junior College. My mom asked me if I wanted to go and I said 'sure.'"

Craig McMillan was not running the Bear Cub basketball program at that time but this exposure led Stevenson to eventually hanging out at campus open gyms.

So after playing for Coach Tom Fitchie at Montgomery High, Stevenson moved over to Coach Steve Done's roster at Santa Rosa Junior College

Some time later, once Stevenson returned from earning his graduate degree at Howard, he again began making it over to the SRJC campus. Running into McMillan, he was first asked "if I had any eligibility. When I told him I was looking into coaching, he then asked if I was interested in helping out with the JC. I thought I had to work my way up. Timing is everything. Kind of like shooting."

Thus began Stevenson's basketball 'Shot Doc' tenure.