Julius Randle wanted to start work. This didn’t surprise Tyler Relph at all. Relph has helped train Randle for more than a decade, since Randle’s time at Prestonwood Christian Academy in Dallas. Still, at age 15, Randle understood the value of equity sweat.
But that was something else. This was different.
When the NBA interrupted its season in March, Randle flew to his hometown and continued to work out, imagining it would be a temporary break. He and Relph fell into an old routine: training, conditioning, staying sharp when the call came so that the Knicks could play again.
This never happened. There would be a bubble in Orlando and most of the league would go there, but the Knicks were left out. Their season is over. And something clicked inside the man who averaged 19.5 points and 9.7 rebounds in a forgettable season.
“He can’t play while everyone else in the league is playing?” Relph says with a laugh. “It drove him crazy.”
Shortly afterwards, Relph received a call on his cell phone. Randle.
“Let’s go to work,” he said.
“Sure,” said Relph. “Just tell me where and when.”
“Stay where you are,” Randle told him. “We are going back to Dallas. We are buying a house. I am going to you. Come on.”
Relph laughs at the memory.
“I have known Ju for many years,” he said. “He wasn’t kidding.”
He wasn’t there. In the past, off-season work often took place in Los Angeles or New York, wherever Randle was staying, a few weeks here, a few weeks there. Sometimes they would take a vacation together and he would invariably wake up at 6 am to go to the gym, then do FaceTime with his weight trainer, then go on a 20-mile bike ride through Miami.
“At some point, I realized that he would like to relax,” says Relph. “But he never did. Not once. This was different. It happened every day. “
In a few days, this meant that the two would meet at a gym at 6 am, training their feet, working on Randle’s swing, 90 minutes of continuous running. Three or four times a week, this was only the second stop on the itinerary, as Randle opened his old high school gym at 5 am to do jumpers alone, the first pack of 1,200 that he would shoot every day, every week. , every month, for nine months.
Soon, Relph introduced him to a weight trainer named Melvin Sanders, and the two men got along immediately.
“Ju likes it when you not only prepare for training, but also exercise with it,” says Relph. “This is Melvin. And that’s me. Thanks to Ju, I am in better shape now than when I played in college. I do not have a choice; otherwise, I would never follow. “
Relph, born in Rochester, NY, played two years in West Virginia and two years in St. Bonaventure and caught the virus from the trainer after he injured his knee after graduation, serving as an apprentice to Bonnies coach Mark Schmidt. In 2010, he decided to become a personal basketball coach and moved to Dallas.
That’s when he met Randle, who was already an early talent, who would have a great freshman year in Kentucky before going to the Lakers with the seventh pick of the 2014 draft. He played in LA for four years, moved to New Orleans for a highly productive 2018-19 season, and then signed a three-year, $ 63 million contract with the Knicks.
“He’s the most hard worker I’ve ever seen,” says Relph. “From a distance. You know, it’s not easy to have an average of 20 and 10 and 3 in the NBA. You don’t just do it by showing up. But even by that standard, he took it to an unbelievable level this summer.”
Every day, Randle showed up at the gym. Sometimes, they had three separate workouts, and these did not include weight sessions with Sanders.
“We had nothing but time,” says Relph, “and he didn’t want to waste it. We were nine months old. So I said to him, ‘Let’s be a star. We will try to make you one of the best players in the league. ‘We went back to what we used to do. Footwork, things to make sure he got to the points fast. Again and again. Everyday.”
Relph emphasized the importance of using a dribble, or two, to be able to kick whenever necessary; when he saw Randle twice use that move to get rid of Giannis Antetokounmpo in the third game of the Knicks of the season, he screamed for joy at the television.
Despite all the hard work, the most important moment of the summer came on July 30, when news came that the Knicks had signed Tom Thibodeau. Relph immediately thought it would be a perfect marriage.
“I knew what it would be,” says Relph. “I said to him, ‘You are going to play 40 [minutes] every night. If you play hard, Thibs will let you go. We didn’t know that he would like him to be a point ahead, but once they talked and he said it, it was just perfect. Play with all of Ju’s strengths.
“It has been phenomenal because Julius and Thibs have the same mindset. They are workers. None of them actually received anything, they had to win everything. Both are the first to work every day. They see things in exactly the same way. “
The payoff, of course, is this season, the Knicks had a surprising start of 5-3, Randle averaging 23.1 points, 12.0 rebounds and 7.4 assists. The All-Star game has already been canceled, but Randle’s goal of taking his game to a star level has so far worked perfectly.
This thrilled the Knicks fans. And it brought joy to 2,100 kilometers to the west, where his friend and coach will officially open this weekend the Tyler Relph Basketball Lab in downtown Dallas, where his current clients – RJ Hamton, Willie Cauley-Stein and Skylar Diggins-Smith, among they – will have a home. And where Julius Randle can always go for a good workout. Although it probably doesn’t stop at just one.