Couch: Lansing's Jasper Bibbs unrelenting in his quest to reach NBA
Okemos and Sexton alum Jasper Bibbs closing in on NBA dream, different from the one he had a decade ago
There is a park bench somewhere in Toronto that embodies Jasper Bibbs’ determination to achieve his NBA dream. The same could be said for the front seat of his trusty 15-year-old SUV — another place he’s slept, without complaint, so he could be at an NBA facility the next morning, ready to volunteer.
The goal: To become a strength and conditioning coach at basketball’s highest level.
Bibbs, a Lansing native who played high school hoops at Sexton and Okemos, is an inspiring example of not letting life’s roadblocks be a deterrent or allowing an aimless path in one’s early 20s to define an entire life.
In the last two years, Bibbs has worked with the Toronto Raptors and Detroit Pistons strength and conditioning staffs for weeks at a time, his curiosity, initiative and follow-through earning respect from people he hopes will be soon be colleagues.
Even if it meant an uncomfortable night’s sleep because he didn’t have the money for a hotel.
“He didn’t tell me any of this, otherwise, he could have stayed at my place,” Raptors strength and conditioning coach Jon Lee said. “I didn’t know until the last day he was leaving. That’s crazy.
“I even referred him to a couple other strength coaches in the league and said, ‘What kind of guy do you want? Do you want a guy who’s willing to sleep in the park and do whatever you want him to do? Or somebody who just got out of school and thinks they’re entitled to be a strength coach?’”
Bibbs didn’t bother saying anything to Lee because, well, pity isn’t among his goals. Nor will it get him anywhere.
“I never told him, because you don’t want to be looked at as this poor … people look at you as less than,” said Bibbs, who also spent a few nights sleeping on the couch at home of friend and former MSU football player Jody McCulloh in the Toronto suburbs. “I’m just like, ‘I’m showing up.’ They don’t need to know my living situation or what was going on. All they needed to know is I was showing up and I was working hard and I was there to learn and to give effort.”
At the NBA Scouting Combine earlier this month in Chicago, you couldn’t tell Bibbs apart from the NBA strength coaches. He stood with them, in his red NBA polo, timing and testing dozens of NBA hopefuls ahead of next month’s draft.
What none of the players knew was that Bibbs was one of them — a young guy, hoping for a big break, his career partly in the hands of others.
Well, one player knew. MSU’s Denzel Valentine was there. He and Bibbs have known each other for about a decade, dating back to when Bibbs would pick Valentine up from Waverly Middle School and drive him to Court One North Athletic Club in Lansing, where Bibbs would put Valentine, Bryn Forbes and others through the paces. His earliest clients.
“We’d jump rope, two-ball dribbling, heavy rope,” Bibbs said.
Bibbs’ trek to the brink of the NBA wasn’t as direct as Valentine’s.
Bibbs was a highly regarded prospect early at Sexton, with interest from a couple mid-major colleges. As a senior, he played on Okemos’ 2006 team that lost in the Class A state finals. Hoping to rekindle interest from Division I programs, he spent a few months at a short-lived basketball factory prep school in Northern Michigan. It was there, Bibbs began to meet his athletic mortality — a torn ACL in his left knee — that would eventually set him on this altered path toward the NBA.
He couldn’t afford professional rehab and eventually tore it again, learning that doctors had set him up for failure by replacing his ACL with a graft from a cadaver.
“They gave me a dead person’s ACL, which, for returning to sports, it’s proven it’s the worst thing you can put in an athlete,” Bibbs said. “The hamstring tendon is supposed to be the best attachment.”
By this time, Bibbs was fascinated by sports science, athletic training and, more than anything, injury prevention.
“The times I did go to physical therapy, I fell in love with physiology,” Bibbs said. “I would look at the physical therapist and they had their khakis and polos and they knew about science and sports and how to get people stronger. I was like, ‘I want that job, I want to do what they do.’ And so I kind of sought out my own information and I stopped going to physical therapy. And I was able to build my own program.’”
Armed with this new desire and seeing nothing good coming of an impoverished life loafing around Lansing, Bibbs enrolled at Western Michigan University.
“I saw a lot of my friends getting in trouble,” Bibbs said. “The water was cut off at mom’s house. Just living in poverty. If you don’t have running water, you can’t even flush the toilet, you can’t wash your hands after.
“I knew I didn’t want to live like that. I knew I at least needed a college degree. I knew I had to do something.”
Bibbs worked his way into WMU’s athletic training program and enjoyed the physical science, but realized athletic training wasn’t his calling.
“That wasn’t my passion to be holding water bottles waiting for someone to get injured,” Bibbs said. “I was more interested in preventing the injuries. And injury prevention is huge in the NBA now.
“I fell in love with the injury prevention part, because I felt when I was in seventh, eighth, ninth grade, if someone would have done an evaluation on me, they would have seen where I was predisposed to certain injuries with my knees. And nobody ever did a proper eval on me to tell me (to work on certain muscles).”
At WMU, Jasper was told he ought to begin looking at graduate schools and at open positions for athletic trainers at local high schools.
“I’m like, I don’t want to do that. I want to work in the NBA,” Bibbs said.
So he set off for a strength and conditioning convention in Chicago two years ago, knowing the NBA staffs would be speaking there.
He met Lee from the Raptors and others, asking if there were opportunities to come in and learn. Lee told him they had NBA pre-draft workouts beginning in a few weeks.
So Bibbs drove through the night to Toronto — smart enough to leave time to be thoroughly harassed at the Canadian border — to make it to the Raptors’ facility by 8 a.m.
“They take me out of the car (at the border), they do a background check on me, they take me inside. They search my car, the whole nine,” Bibbs said. “I had to show them all the emails from Jon Lee. They asked me, ‘Why are you so special, why do you get to do this?’ I really didn’t have an answer. I was like, I’m going because I want to go.”
Bibbs left Toronto sleep deprived and energized. He wrote to Bill Foran, the long-time Miami Heat strength and conditioning coach, and flew to Miami on his own dime to further the connection. That led to another connection, which then led to Detroit Pistons head strength coach Anthony Harvey, who Bibbs learned would be helping run last year’s convention in Chicago after the scouting combine. So Bibbs went to help. Busy work, anything that was asked.
He then moved to Florida, thinking there might be more opportunity to train athletes on his own. He traveled with the AAU team of heralded Michigan prospects Josh Jackson (headed to Kansas) and Devon Daniels (Utah), serving as their trainer and strength coach. And then moved back home not long after when his mother told him she had breast cancer. He wanted to help her get to her chemotherapy appointments, make sure she was eating, give his energy and what he had learned to the woman who’d sacrificed for him.
“I didn’t know if it was the last time I was going to get to spend time with her,” Bibbs said of his mother, whose cancer is in remission.
Back in Michigan, he called Harvey last fall to ask if he could help with the Pistons in any way. Players were starting to trickle in before training camp, Harvey said. Come on over.
“Just in that two weeks that he was around that environment, the players adapted to him,” Harvey said. “The players wanted him around. He’s a good guy, he’s very helpful, very personable, and even the coaches, they like him, he’s such a great dude. He’s a guy I would definitely fight for, try to get a position in the NBA. If it’s not with me, it’d be with another team. Even here, if I’m learning of positions that are open, I’m introducing him to the other strength coaches. If I can’t help him by getting some type of position with Detroit, at least another team can pick up somebody that’s as good as him.”
Bibbs, certified as both an athletic trainer and strength and conditioning coach, is hoping by this fall he’ll be in the league — an an assistant strength coach, an intern, whatever. The title doesn’t matter. Just that he’s in the door.
“You’ve got to strike while the iron is hot,” Bibbs said. “I have to continue to chase this dream now. If I have NBA coaches emailing me and telling me they want me to work in the NBA, I need to pursue that.
“Back when I tore my ACL, I thought that was the worst thing ever. If that hadn’t happened, I might have chased a career, played at a small D-II, I might not have been working the (NBA) combine and have done a lot of things I’ve done.”
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.