Overview:
Justin Joyner served as UCSB’s basketball team captain for three seasons while leading the Gauchos to back-to-back NCAA Tournaments in 2010 and 2011
Justin Joyner was in no rush to quit his job at the University of Michigan when he took a new one at Oregon State last month.
You grind through the overtime when you want your final day to come at college basketball’s Final Four.
“We’ve obviously still got some work to do, finishing our work there,” Joyner said during his March 11 introduction as the Beavers’ head coach.
Joyner, the point guard and captain of UC Santa Barbara’s 2010 and 2011 NCAA tournament teams, has enjoyed the most delirious March Madness of his life as an assistant coach for the Wolverines.
Michigan (36-3) trounced Arizona 91-73 on Saturday to advance to Monday’s 5:50 p.m. NCAA final to play Connecticut (34-5) at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
“I know he’s not sleeping,” his former Gaucho coach, Bob Williams, told Noozhawk. “I’m really proud of J.J. for seeing his commitment through at Michigan.
“There are so many guys this day and age who would’ve said, ‘Hey, I’ve got to go … I need to get started there as their new coach,’ but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“I told J.J., ‘I hope it’s not the only time, but let’s be realistic … this very well could be the only time that you’re on a team competing for a national championship.’”
The 38-year-old Joyner has played a big part in helping Wolverines head coach Dusty May revive a moribund Michigan program the last two years.
“For him to allow me to have the voice that I’ve had with that program and help him take an 8-24 team to where we are currently, it means the world to me,” Joyner said.
“He’s probably the best modern-day basketball coach in terms of what he does for his players … how he is really relational and understands that this is a partnership, this is not a dictatorship.
“I’m so thankful for him in allowing me to be a part of his journey in taking over at Michigan and making it the best program in the country.”
Rocky Road
Cutting out on the Wolverines in the postseason would’ve cut against the grain of the Justin Joyner that UCSB fans remember.
He kept playing for the Gauchos even while taking more injury hits than when Rocky Balboa squared off against Apollo Creed.
UCSB teammate Paul Roemer, his friend since grammar school, once pointed out that Joyner got his inspiration from the Sylvester Stallone character.
“He plays a video of Rocky IV before every home game and watches the training montage,” Roemer revealed during their sophomore season as Gauchos. “You know the scene — when he’s working out in the falling snow and punching slabs of meat.
“His opponent, Drago, has all these high-tech machines, but Rocky is old-school. He doesn’t need those things.
“He’s just a warrior, and J.J. loves to watch that.”
Joyner’s Gaucho wounds included a severely sprained ankle, a torn hip muscle and, most injuriously, the right wrist he broke … twice.
It required surgery that forced him to redshirt between his sophomore and junior years.
That old injury has Joyner feel the 134 career steals — the fourth-most in UCSB history — every cold day in Ann Arbor.
“When I’m reaching in to get a steal, now that’s when it’s really painful,” Joyner had said during his sophomore season. “Sometimes I’ve had to catch myself from shying away from that.
“I’ll get a steal and it’ll hurt like hell.”
Joyner played with the broken wrist for the entire second half of that sophomore season.
“He knew it, I knew it … he could hardly dribble the ball with his right hand,” Williams recalled last week. “But he could make a free throw, and he’d bring it up lefthanded, and he’d say, ‘I’m fine, coach … I’ll make it through the season.’
“But all that credit goes to mom and dad — that’s how he was raised — and to his high school coach, Frank Allocco, and the relationship he had with J.J., and how he challenged him.”
Joyner had reached his wits’ end when he stumbled on the foot of teammate Jon Pastorek during a practice just before the start of his junior season. He limped painfully on a bum ankle all season.
“I got really down at times,” Joyner conceded late that year. “I never thought about hanging it up, but I’d get so frustrated during practice that I’d say, ‘Screw it! I can’t play!’
“At the same time, the coaches and players showed me that they really cared and wanted me to succeed.”
Will Brew, who took over Joyner’s starting position that season, cared enough to tell Williams to keep Joyner in a game the following year at 22nd-ranked UNLV.
He saw the fire in Joyner’s eyes after he’d made back-to-back three-pointers.
Joyner continued on to lead the Gauchos to a 68-62, upset victory with six assists and four steals.
“I moved J.J. back into the starting lineup after that,” Williams recalled. “I had Brew in the starting lineup for a long time because we won it the year before with him as a freshman point guard.
“I had the luxury of bringing J.J. off the bench, and he was dynamite coming off the bench … But, well, when I put him in a starting role, he was even better.”
Mother Knows Best
Joyner bucked up during his darkest days with the help of his mother, Cheryl Zocchi.
“I’m so grateful for the sacrifices she made,” he said, “putting me around great leaders and great people who helped form me as a young man and ultimately give me a chance at success in this world.”
But it was her coaching that got him through the longest emotional trial of his life.
Before a crucial game at Cal State Fullerton in mid-February of 2010, with the Big West Conference title on the line, she encouraged him to put the aches and failures out of his mind and shoot the basketball with the certainty of success.
His problematic wrist and gimpy ankle had kept him from making a basket all season. But Mom’s voice echoed in his head when a pass found him in the far corner with the Gauchos trailing and just 3:03 on the clock.
“She watches our games on the internet all the time,” said Joyner, who had missed his previous 13 shots of that season — eight of which were three-point attempts.
“I wonder what she was thinking, because I passed up a layup earlier and threw a not-too-good of a pass instead.
“I realized, man, I’ve got to shoot that.”
Joyner did not hesitate to launch the ball. The nets kicked up as it swished through.
The clutch basket gave the Gauchos the lead in a game they would win, 73-65.
It propelled them to the conference championship and their first NCAA tournament bid since 2003.
“He’s had a really intriguing career because he’s never not been successful,” Williams said. “You look at his high school career, you look at college, you look at coaching … It’s everywhere he’s been.”
Joyner won Big West championships in three of his years as a Gaucho — regular-season titles in 2008 and 2010, and league-tournament crowns in 2010 and 2011.
He came to UCSB after having led Concord’s De La Salle High School to a state championship in 2006. His two clutch free throws with 7.7 seconds remaining beat Clovis West in the final at Sacramento’s old ARCO Arena.
Joyner wasn’t shy about taking charge of the Gauchos as their starting point guard the next season. He handed out a team-high 81 assists.
“Even as a freshman, he was fearless at challenging people … and challenging them the right way,” Williams said. “Challenging people to show up and buy in and pay the price.”
Joyner, whose 357 career assists still ranks in UCSB’s all-time top 10, served three seasons as a team captain.
“He was one of these guys who just didn’t make mistakes,” Williams said. “He’d play 36 minutes with no turnovers, six assists, six points … I mean, he was never a big scorer, but he was a really, really good point guard.
“He understood the game. It was the great thing about him.”
Senior Moment
Joyner’s leadership proved crucial during his senior year of 2010-2011 when the defending Big West champs, stacked with future NBA players Orlando Johnson and James Nunnally, struggled with internal bickering through most of the year.
Their record was just 14-13 entering the final week of the regular season. But then Williams had all the Gauchos exorcise their demons by writing their grievances onto paper that they then tossed into a bonfire.
It turned out to be a bonding fire.
“That turned that group around, and J.J. was an integral part of that whole thing,” he said.
“He was right in the middle of that, as he was right in the middle of everything with that team.”
Joyner made a point during the post-season banquet to thank his teammates for how they put their differences aside for the common good.
“This year could’ve been bad … really bad,” he told them. “My high school coach was always asking me, ‘How do you want to be remembered?’
“I always wanted to be remembered as a winner, and so I thank you guys for helping me achieve that this year, and last year, too.”
Johnson, a second-round pick in the NBA draft a year later, had won the Big West tournament MVP award by scoring 85 points in UCSB’s three games.
But the Gauchos wouldn’t have won the title without Joyner, too.
He tied the school’s tournament record with nine assists in a quarterfinal victory over Pacific.
“He’s charismatic, he’s relentless, and he will do what it takes to be successful.”
Former UCSB Basketball Coach Bob Williams
Williams didn’t dare give him even one minute of rest when UCSB faced regular-season champion Long Beach State in the final.
Joyner hounded Casper Ware, the league’s player of the year, into a 5-for-17 shooting night.
He also withstood Ware’s relentless pressure to hand out four assists with just two turnovers while helping the Gauchos pull out a 64-56 victory that advanced them to the NCAA tournament for the second-straight year.
“J.J. might be as competitive a human being as we’ve ever had here,” Williams said after the game. “If you ever try to win a conversation or argument with him, you’ll understand.
“And his confidence level at the Big West tournament was real obvious. The fact that I didn’t take him off the floor during the championship game was a pretty good indicator on his value.
“But more than anything to me was that he was a guy who had to persevere through all the injuries, all the hardships, all the pain that he had to go through to get himself back to lead his team … It speaks volumes to his character.”
It was what made Williams realize that his point guard would become a champion coach some day.
Coach Class
Joyner spent one season as a graduate assistant at UCSB before he was asked to start a Bay Area youth basketball program called Energy Flight Elite.
“I knew I wanted to lead, I knew I wanted to coach, I just didn’t know in what capacity I wanted to coach,” he said. “They hired me for $800 a month to coach a seventh-grade B team, a second-grade team, and train players.
“That was when my fire was ignited as a basketball coach and as a leader.”
Starting out as a teacher, Williams said, was “a healthy” first step in his journey as a coach.
“He had the natural demeanor and personality to be successful at it,” he said. “People like being around him.
“He’s charismatic, he’s relentless, and he will do what it takes to be successful.”
Joyner was coaching one of Energy Flight Elite’s teams at a Las Vegas tournament in 2017 when he was approached by Saint Mary’s coach Randy Bennett.
“He hired me off a seventh-grade basketball court … I mean, literally,” he said. “I finished a game in Las Vegas and he hired me off that court.
“He instilled confidence in me, he instilled belief in me, he instilled professionalism in me.
“And, ultimately, he gave me a chance to help lead his program … and lead it to a better place than I’d found it.”
Joyner helped Bennett win NCAA tournament bids four times in his seven seasons at the school while logging a record of 171-60.
The Gaels went 53-16 when he was promoted to associate head coach in the last two seasons.
That was also when he won the hand of Tracy Hamm, the women’s soccer coach at UC Davis. Coach Williams led them in their vows.
“He showed me another side of this profession as a college coach,” Joyner said of Williams, “understanding how important it is to be there for your student-athletes, not only on the basketball court but also in the classroom, and also to be a mentor and a father figure.
“He really leaned into me a ton and gave me the opportunity to grow in my formative years of 18 to 23, and really poured into me.
“I’m so grateful for him. He actually officiated my wedding three years ago, and he’ll be in my life forever.”
The Joyners’ bliss included the birth of their daughter, Weslee, in 2023.
“We had a great life at Saint Mary’s, we really did,” Joyner said. “I lived five to 10 minutes away from Saint Mary’s College. Tracy was commuting to Davis, but we lived together and we were a family.
“And it was awesome.”
The Michigan Man
But Michigan coach Dusty May made an offer after the 2024 season that Joyner couldn’t refuse: a top assistant’s job at the highest level of college basketball.
His pain the next few months, with his family still back in California, was worse than anything he’d felt in his ankle, hip or even wrist.
“I remember my first two weeks on the job at Michigan, every morning I’d wake up and be almost in a depression just because I wasn’t there with my family,” Joyner said. “I’d think, ‘What did I do? What was I thinking? I just ruined my life.’
“With Tracy’s strength and her commitment, and her positivity, and her belief in us as a family and as a unit, I was able to get through that, and so did we as a family.”
For two years, much of Joyner’s daddy-daughter time came on FaceTime.
“She’s got an unbelievable motor,” he said when asked about Weslee. “She knows every song in the book. She loves to sing.
“She can say her ABC’s forward and backward. She’s nonstop.
“She’s so fun to be around. She’s got a huge personality. She makes our life much better.”
Joyner said his wife was a “rock star” in how she dealt with the long-distance arrangement.
“She made sure that if she had two or three days, she was going to be in Ann Arbor,” he said. “Or she was going to be in Vegas when we were there for a tournament so we all could be together.
“We had to be creative, certainly. And Dusty was so supportive of our family, which was how I want to be as a head coach.
“He gave me the autonomy to leave and miss a practice, maybe. Allowing me to go be a dad and go be a husband was huge for me.”
He and Tracy made a vow to “have this thing figured out” and be living together full time again by the time Weslee reached age 5.
That vision began to take focus last season when Tracy was hired as the head women’s soccer coach at the University of Oregon.
Her husband was considering a job opening at a West Coast Conference school in California when he received a call from Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes.
The Beavers needed a coach in Corvallis, just 50 miles away from Joyner’s family in Eugene.
“It really was a blessing,” he said during his Oregon State news conference.
He then turned to his wife to say, “and I’m so excited for you to learn that you represent the second-best institution in Oregon.”
They both laughed.
It was a far cry, quite literally, from when he first told Tracy that he was coming home for good to coach at Oregon State.
“I FaceTimed her, and she was in tears — out of her mind — which was awesome,” Joyner said. “About three minutes later I said, ‘All right, get it all out now … The tears are over … Let’s get to work.’”
The Final Four awaited … and so did a new start.
