Kevin Gorman: On way to NBA, Cameron Johnson plans to give back to grassroots basketball

The night before Cameron Johnson realized his wildest dreams, he reminisced about his roots.

That a product of Western Pennsylvania is an NBA first-round draft pick is almost as much of an anomaly in the basketball world as a lottery pick with a master’s degree.

Johnson is proud to be both.

Before blossoming into a first-team All-ACC selection as a fifth-year senior at North Carolina, the 6-foot-8 sharpshooter played at Moon and Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. Johnson graduated from Pitt in three years with a bachelor’s degree in communications, something most NBA draft picks don’t have.

Hours before Johnson was selected 11th overall by the Phoenix Suns on Thursday night – making him the first WPIAL alum chosen in the first round of the NBA Draft in two decades – he vowed to help change the culture of grassroots basketball here.

As improbable as Johnson’s rise from the WPIAL to the NBA is, what’s even more remarkable is how he developed despite the lack of a nationally renowned AAU program.

Once he gets settled in the NBA, Johnson plans to sponsor a program that can showcase the region’s talent.

“I think Western Pennsylvania basketball is on the rise,” Johnson said. “We increasingly have more high-quality players coming out of this region. Obviously, there’s not a superstar AAU program. One thing I’d really like to do is try to increase basketball footprint in this area. I think this area deserves a good AAU program and some trainers in the area are doing a lot to make this more of a basketball-suited area.”

Johnson knows what it’s like to win an AAU national championship. He was a second-grader on Team C.R.O.N.S. when it won the 2004 AAU 8-and-under national title in Memphis, Tenn.

Team C.R.O.N.S. — the acronym stands for Come Ready Or Never Start – was coached by Johnson’s father, Gil, and Darelle Porter. They were teammates at Pitt in the late 1980s along with Pat Cavanaugh, whose company sponsored the club.

The team featured five future Division-I players, including former WPIAL stars in Johnson, Obama Academy’s D.J. Porter (St. Francis, N.Y.) and Montour’s Devin Wilson (Virginia Tech); Nick Schmidt (Alfred), whose father Mark coached at Robert Morris; and Youngstown native Craig Randall, who played at Memphis, Duquesne and UT-Martin.

But the talent on the team took a hit when Mark Schmidt took the St. Bonaventure job and moved his family to Olean, N.Y., and Randall played his senior season in Phoenix.

The region had a nationally prominent AAU program at the high-school level in the Pittsburgh J.O.T.S., where future NBA players DeJuan Blair and D.J. Kennedy and NFL players Jon Baldwin and Terrelle Pryor all played on the same team a decade ago. It also produced Western Pennsylvania’s last lottery pick in Danny Fortson, who moved from Altoona to Shaler and was taken 10th overall in 1997.

But there was a void when Johnson was coming up. Now, he has a personal interest to invest in a traveling team, as his two younger brothers who are rising basketball players. Donovan “Puff” Johnson is a top-50 prospect in the Class of 2020, while 14-year-old Braylon will be a freshman at Moon this fall.

Cameron Johnson hopes to use his influence and his contacts within Western Pennsylvania basketball to bring the sport to the forefront, which would be a boost to a city known for football.

“The more we can incorporate kids from the area, the more it will grow,” Johnson said. “The next step from that is to get these kids into a big program like you see around the country. The better program we can establish, the more players we can keep in our area, the better our basketball will be.”

And the better our basketball becomes, Cameron Johnson hopes to have his fingerprints on the footprint.