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Editor’s note: This is the third in a series about men’s college basketball coaches finding success on the margins in recruiting.

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The entrance to the practice gym was right below John Beilein’s office at Michigan, and Beilein knew when Caris LeVert was putting in extra time. Usually it meant a Jimmy John’s delivery driver would be knocking at that door.

LeVert made the sub sandwich part of his routine, because getting food delivered meant he could skip leaving the gym for lunch. He’d go from a morning session right into an afternoon session, pouring extra hours into his game every single day.

“Self-starter,” Beilein says years later of the most successful pro he coached during his 41 years as a college head coach.

LeVert’s work ethic, clearly, was something special and a big part of the reason he went from the No. 239-ranked player in his class to one day being a first-round NBA Draft pick and, eventually, a player who averaged more than 20 points per game in an NBA season.

While working on this project, the one thing every college coach said separated their pros was work ethic. Some guys play basketball because they’re good at it, but the ones who thrive play because they love it. And they love the work.

The question becomes: Are some schools better at cultivating a culture of work than others? Or does their success lead to work?

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Kansas coach Bill Self has a theory that there are more good players now than ever. It’s why Self does not worry about perception if he takes a lower-rated player. He’s coached six players at Kansas who were ranked outside of the top 100 and made the NBA, including his two most recent draft picks: Ochai Agbaji and Christian Braun.

“Taking those guys at a place like Kansas gives the appearance that maybe they’re not recruiting as well as they have in the past,” Self says.

What he leans on is the evaluation — explosiveness and shooting matter most to him — and then he indoctrinates them in the Kansas culture. The Jayhawks have won 16 of the last 18 regular-season Big 12 titles. And what it takes to get there is passed down from one group to the next. Self benefits from being able to point to previous pros who might not have started as a freshman — like Frank Mason, Thomas Robinson or Devonte’ Graham — and eventually those players turn into All-Americans.

His formula: Those lower-rated guys have the “same upside after year two or three or four as the five-stars do after year one.”

And what Self has seen is that it’s easier to pull this off now than it was when he got into coaching.

“Because there’s more interest level,” he says. “There’s better coaching. There’s more guys with their private trainers. There’s more access to to competition — all these things. There’s more opportunities, so I think there’s more good players than there ever has been.

“Now that doesn’t mean there are more (Michael) Jordans or (Patrick) Ewings or (Chris) Mullins or LeBron (Jameses) or Kobe (Bryants), those guys still only come around once every so often. But there’s still more good players. There are more players out there I believe that can make a team better at the high-major level than there ever has been.”

Gonzaga coach Mark Few believes Kobe Bryant’s influence has changed the way players see work.

“I give Kobe a lot of credit for this, like just that Kobe mentality of just working, working, working. You’ve got to work.” Few says. “So I think they’re coming to us with way, way, way more understanding of, ‘Hey, I gotta really put my time in. I got to work my game’ maybe more than players did 10 to 15, definitely 20 years ago.”

The challenge in the one-time transfer era is convincing players to wait their turn. The four schools that have put the most non-five-stars into the NBA in the last 15 years— Kansas, Michigan, Virginia and Gonzaga — have all benefitted from players who have been patient.

Out of the 38 non-five star players they’ve coached as freshmen since 2006 to make it in the NBA, only 15 started a majority of their games as freshmen.

Virginia coach Tony Bennett has never coached a five-star recruit. That’s not intentional. He says he’s still waiting for the right one, and his honesty probably hasn’t helped in that regard.

“I’d rather undersell a little bit,’” he says. “Don’t be intoxicated by all the promises. If you’re good enough when you get there, you’re gonna play if it’s about playing time. If you’re not, no matter what anybody tells you, you’re gonna (need to) have some patience. And don’t be afraid of that. It’s so easy to tell young men and parents and people what they want to hear, and it’s fluff. It’s not real.”

These coaches can operate like NBA coaches because their success has given them the authority to play those who are ready, and those who aren’t are usually able to accept it.

Before they’re ready to play, Bennett says, they need to be sound.

“They better know how to defend,” he says. “They better be efficient and maybe even kind of be a bit of a role player first and do the tough things, the things that a coach will trust. I think that’s one thing we try to really emphasize. You’re going to have to learn what it means to guard the ball, to be a great screener, a great offensive rebounder, a great guy off the pick and roll, a guy who can play efficient. You pick up some of these things that aren’t sexy or appealing at times, but you learn those and those are valued. Coaches are playing who they trust.”

This is the reality in the NBA, and going through that has helped a lot of the players at these schools enter a scenario in the league where they are not stars when they arrive. It’s why many coaches feared the introduction of immediate eligibility for transfers, because it’s harder to get players to be patient.

Bennett has asked his former players who have made the NBA and had to wait their turn whether they would have stuck it out.

“It’s funny,” Bennett says. “They said, to a man, without a doubt, the best thing for my career and why I believe I’ve made it and been very successful in the NBA is when it got tough, I stuck it out. I battled through it. I just kept going as hard even though I had all the doubts. People were telling me you got to get out. And then I came out as more mature, tougher-minded. I didn’t shortcut the process. But ironically, some of them have said if this rule were in place, I don’t know if I would have stuck it out. Some said I would have no matter what. I knew. Some guys said that would have been a close call. I might have left and that would have been the biggest mistake I could have made.”

Bennett tries to play those scenarios out during the recruiting process to weed out the players who aren’t willing to wait.

At Gonzaga, the waiting is almost expected. Out of the eight future pros who weren’t five-stars who have made the NBA from Gonzaga, not one was a starter as a freshman. Kelly Olynyk even redshirted in the middle of his career as a junior to get stronger and improve his game. John Jakus, a former director of operations at Gonzaga, calls what Few has developed the “Gonzaga incubator.”

“We put as many resources and as much energy and time and everything we got into player development,” Few says. “I’ve tried to base our program for 25 years on team chemistry and player development — those two things. So we try to do everything we can and we try to find guys who want to work and want to get better and view themselves (as one day) becoming NBA players but understand it’s gonna take a lot of hours. And those are the ones that work really, really well here.”

Being able to share those stories has power, but when it’s player-driven, that’s even more valuable. Jakus, for instance, is now at Baylor as an assistant. He brought with him former Gonzaga walk-on Rem Bakamus as a graduate assistant. Bakamus, who learned how to work from former Gonzaga point guard Kevin Pangos, became the workout guy for Davion Mitchell, whose work ethic became the stuff of legend at Baylor. Mitchell was a worker already, but he learned how to work smarter under Bakamus, starting with his sit-out year in 2018-19. In his first college season at Auburn, he averaged 3.7 points per game. Three years, later he was a lottery pick.

Since Mitchell debuted on the floor for Baylor in the 2019-20 season, the Bears are 81-13, have won their first two Big 12 regular seasons titles in school history and a national championship. That second Big 12 title came without him, but he’d set a new standard.

“One thing we try to recruit are guys who work so hard, that it makes everyone else raise their level in practice,” Baylor coach Scott Drew said. “When a coach is blessed to coach a player who plays as hard as Davion Mitchell, it raises everyone’s level each and every day, which allows you to become consistently great.”

On Mitchell’s draft night, he brought with him Bakamus and fellow former Baylor graduate assistants Matt Gray and Peyton Prudhomme to show his appreciation for helping turn him into a lottery pick.

Gratitude, Beilein believes, is another marker for those who make it.

“Many of these guys (who made it) were extremely grateful to have the opportunity to be coached,” Beilein says. “And they were in it to just be the best they could. They would allow themselves to be coached, whether it was in the pros, in high school or with us. That was really a big thing that they really believed in their high school coaches, their college coaches, their pro coaches and just dove all in with both feet with no excuses.”

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NBA evaluators say which school a player attends doesn’t always matter to them, but the same player traits the college coaches are after is identical in the NBA.

The Golden State Warriors, for instance, built a dynasty through the draft. The Warriors just won their fourth championship in eight years. The two stars of their dynasty, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, had just one high-major school show real interest in either the summer before their senior year in high school. That would be Washington State, which started recruiting Thompson only after another player de-committed from the school. Bennett, the coach of Washington State at the time, made that a big part of his pitch to Thompson, who was from Los Angeles.

“Let’s show them what they’re gonna miss out on at the end of this thing,” Bennett says. “We call it the Rocky mentality, like just give me a chance and I’ll fight you tooth and nail. With Klay, that was a motivation. Some of those guys passed me up. He just wanted a chance. He could shoot and move, but he wasn’t the finished product when we got him. He wanted to be a complete player. He knew defense mattered and just wanted to be pushed.”

We know that the shooting of Curry and Thompson have made the dynasty possible, but who they’ve been surrounded by matters too. And the Warriors have been one of the best franchises at finding players who become stars in their role.

And how they identify them sounds eerily familiar to the approach of the college coaches above.

“Our goal,” assistant general manager Kirk Lacob says, “is usually to dig into how competitive a kid is, what his work ethic is like — his true work ethic — and their resilience. Nothing’s like black and white, really clear. Kids can change too, right? But there are certain levels of resilience that you see in certain people even at a young age. Work ethic is something that we think you can improve upon a lot. You just want to see there’s a baseline for it. And ultimately, what makes them tick? What gets them motivated?

“And competitiveness. We kind of feel like you have that or you don’t. Sometimes it’s hard to see that in a college game, and you’ve got to really dig. The coaches might not even really know if a guy’s competitive or not, but if you get enough stories from enough angles — you talk to strength coach, you talk to their friend, you talk to family, or you talk to the high school coach and college coaches — you can start to formulate a semblance of if this kid really is competitive or not, is he resilient or not, and those are some of the key things.”

A player ordering Jimmy John’s so he can stay in the gym is a predictor of future success. And the coaches best at finding those guys are the ones willing to ask the right questions and listen. And then simply take the time to watch them outside of a game.

“You usually had to watch them work out,” Beilein says, “to know if they loved it.”

(Top photo of Davion Mitchell: Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)