Basketball legend Christian Laettner to conduct June camps in Denmark 

By Kelly Fenton

The Denmark News

DENMARK – Despite being one of the best-known basketball players of all time, Christian Laettner figures most of the kids who attend his basketball camps aren’t aware of who he is … not on the first day, anyway. They know Michael and Kobe and LeBron and Steph, sure. But Christian? Not necessarily.

After all, even those in the older camp for 14- to 17-year olds weren’t born by the time Laettner concluded a 14-year NBA career. 

“But you can see on Tuesday morning, after they’ve gone home and told their parents about the tall old guy with the whistle and the loud voice, they’re looking at me a little different,” Laettner said, laughing, in a phone interview this week. “They’ve gone home and their parents have shown them some grainy old YouTube videos and it’s made an impression and they’re paying a little more attention.”

Anyone old enough to remember Laettner and those Duke teams from the early nineties can appreciate those kids’ sudden attitude shifts. This is one of college basketball’s all-time greats, based not just on the otherworldly career numbers he put up or the fact that he led the Blue Devils to consecutive national championships, but on all those clutch shots he hit. One of those – the buzzer-beating, game-winning turnaround jumper from the top of the circle against Kentucky in the 1992 East Regional final – is known simply as The Shot and has been listed as one of the top five most memorable moments in sports history.

Laettner went on to earn an Olympic gold medal as a member of the so-called Dream Team in 1992 and followed that with a laudable NBA career. 

So, yeah, the kids might need a moment to gather themselves come Tuesday morning.

Learning Key Skills

Laettner will bring his basketball camp to Denmark for three days this summer, June 24-26.

The camps are for kids 9-13 and 14-17 and will be held Monday through Wednesday at Denmark High School. The camp for the older group will run every day from 8 to 11 a.m., with the younger camp running from 12:15 to 3:15 p.m. The cost is $135 per participant for ages 14-17 and $125 for the younger kids.

Laettner, whose accolades are too long to account for here but include 1992 NCAA Player of the Year, 1991 Final Four Most Outstanding Player, NBA Rookie First Team and NBA All-Star in 1997, has been conducting his camps since 2010, many of them in Minnesota and Wisconsin, as well as in the Buffalo area, near where Laettner grew up in Angola, NY. Previous Wisconsin stops for Laettner’s camp include Mosinee, Gladstone, Shawano and Ashland, among others. This will be his first stop in Denmark.

“I love these Great Lakes towns,” he said. “It’s a very similar type of area and geography like I grew up around Lake Erie. Most of the camps we have kids coming from as far as five hours away so I’m hoping we get kids from Green Bay and Madison and Eau Claire coming to Denmark.”

The camp here came about via a relationship Laettner has with Edward Jones Investments and with James Grasee, a Denmark resident who works for the investment company. Grasee will host Laettner at his house while he’s in town. Grasee and Kaila Stencil, owner of Stenciled, are sponsoring the T-shirts, while Gandrud Auto Group in Green Bay is covering the gym fee. 

Laettner often runs the camps on his own with the aid of local high school coaches and players. Denmark head coach Pete Dewar and three of his varsity players will be assisting with the camps in Denmark.

With the younger kids, Laettner says he focuses on the four key skills: catching, passing, dribbling and layups. 

“Everybody today wants to shoot three-point shots,” said Laettner, who made almost half of his shots from beyond the arc at Duke. “But we want to teach them the basics. With the older kids, it’s a little different. We want to stress that you don’t have to always dribble, dribble, dribble. We’ll use a 5-on-5 challenge where we’ll get them to move the ball around without dribbling. By the second or third day, it’s evolved to passing and cutting, moving without the ball, not relying on dribbling so much.”

‘Huge Sense of Joy’

Laettner admits he is old school when it comes to drilling kids. His parents were both teachers and his father was a coach and that has informed his approach to learning.

“They were very demanding of me,” he said. “I’m not sure kids are used to that anymore. It seems like everyone has to be handled gently. I’m not from that school. I think if you look at the percentage of people who really get good at something who had someone who was demanding or a little bit harder on them, it’s like ninety-five percent.

“But I do it in a lighthearted way,” he added. “I love to have fun with the kids but I’ll have to crack the whip sometimes.”

For a man who has achieved so much, Laettner clearly derives a lot of personal satisfaction from his camps.

“It’s a huge sense of joy,” he said. “I cannot describe how good that feels when you see them run a successful give-and-go.” 

In that East Regional final in 1992, the defending champion Blue Devils trailed 103-102 with two seconds left. Grant Hill delivered a court-length pass to Laettner at the top of the circle. Laettner caught it, spun and delivered the game-winner – his 10th field goal in 10 attempts – and Duke went on to repeat as national champs a week later.

Asked if kids ever ask him to recreate The Shot, Laettner laughed.

“Occasionally,” he said. “But I usually turn them down. I’m older now and I’ll probably miss that shot nowadays anyway, so it’s more fun just to take photos with the kids.”

You can sign up for the camp online at https://laettnercamps.com/