Alexis Hornbuckle’s first coach was her father, Jerome, and she wasn’t out of elementary school before he asked her, “Do you want to play? Or do you want to play?”
“He was basically asking me, ‘Do you want to have fun, or do you want to be great?’” she says after a June morning camp session at B-Maze Elite. Alexis coaches at B-Maze alongside Bobby Maze, a friend and former student athlete at the University of Tennessee. “This was before I was nine years old. By the sixth grade, I was telling everyone I was committed to Tennessee and Pat Summit.”
This isn’t unusual - for young athletes to boast about where they will end up in college and in professional sports. For most, those are pipe dreams and wishful thinking, but that wasn’t the case for young West Virginia native. Alexis was playing travel basketball at nine, and by 12, she’d watched A Cinderella Season: The Lady Vols Fight Back, which documented a full season of Lady Vol Basketball under Coach Pat Summit leading up to them winning their second championship in 1997. In that documentary, young Alexis saw her future.
“It’s her killer instinct. Pure domination,” she says. “[Coach Summit] wanted perfection.”
Alexis took her official visit to Tennessee when she was a senior in high school, but she’d been on campus before then to visit her cousin, Dr. Lyndsey Hornbuckle, who, at the time, was studying Nutrition and Exercise Physiology. (Dr. Hornbuckle is currently an assistant professor at UTK.) Though Alexis was following her dream of playing for Pat Summit, the transition from high school to college took some extra work.
“For me, it was more mentally demanding than physically. It took self-discipline and time management. In high school, I only needed a few credits to graduate, so I was doing some community service and had all of these gaps of time for school work and practice,” she says. “In college, you had study hall hours and 8 a.m. classes for sure, because we were student athletes, meaning student first. [Coach Summit] had a 100 percent graduation rate.”
Alexis graduated from Tennessee in 2008 with a degree in Sociology, but it was her time on the court in a combo guard position, under the leadership of Pat Summit, that was her dream come true. Alexis has two NCAA Championships and three SEC Championships under her belt, and still holds the All-Time Steals record at Tennessee. She went on to be the fourth overall WNBA draft pick to start her professional career with the Detroit Shock.
“We’d played the championship the night before, and ESPN gave interviews the next morning, so we had to hurry up and drive to the draft. I couldn’t process the goodness - ending on back-to-back championships, graduation, then being drafted in the top five, the smile on my parents’ and brother’s faces,” she recalls. The smile on her face says it all.
Her professional career came fast with a suitcase and passport. After several seasons with the WNBA (Detroit, Tulsa, Minnesota), Alexis continued to play basketball overseas (in Spain, Israel, Puerto Rico, Finland, just to name a few). For more than a decade, Alexis was on the court as a professional player, but a few years ago, she knew it was time to take the step towards coaching.
“It actually started about eight years ago, when I realized that I loved teaching the game. My dad had a knee replacement in 2013, so I flew down to Texas, where they were living at the time, to fill in and coach his middle school team. I ended up coaching the whole season,” she says. “I learned that, one, I can do it, and, two, I’m able to teach all levels. I had kids who’d never picked up the ball before. I got pure joy out of seeing them succeed.”
There are plenty of techniques and strategies she’s picked up as a player, but Alexis credits her father and Pat Summit for grounding her in a few key phrases.
“‘Butt-down, chest up, eyes up.’ That’s from my dad. That’s the sitting stance you should be in. That’s gotten me through my career,” she says. “And ‘Get in a stance!’ That’s Pat Summit. She’d also say, ‘If you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. If you’re late, don’t bother showing up.’”
Decades of experience - playing, studying, listening - turned her into the kind of coach who can pinpoint the kids who are true competitors, those who aren’t on the court for fun.
“When we’re doing something, you challenge them to see if they’re talented or competitive,” she says. “You’re not a competitor if you don’t want to be challenged. How does the saying go? ‘Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard’.”
Alexis started coaching privately in North Carolina but recently brought her business and passion back to Knoxville. Alexis Hornbuckle Basketball is made up of public camps and clinics, private coaching, and building up young players, especially girls, into more than basketball players. She aims to teach them leadership both on and off the court. She’s particularly passionate about strong mental health and has partnered with Revitalist Clinic to better understand the benefits of total mind and body well being.
“Pat Summit’s legacy is all over the world, but it literally sits here. Watching the Lady Vol program over the last few years, we’re missing the connection. If I can, on the ground level, have some sort of hand in giving more of that grit and grind back to Tennessee, I want to,” says Alexis. “It’s not all about Tennessee. It’s about college anywhere. But if I have a hand in getting a girl to Tennessee, I’m all over that. I want to manifest that.”
Learn more at AlexisHornbuckle.com and follow @AlexisHornbuckleBasketball on Instagram.