When Butler walk-on Alex Barlow had the ball in his hands, No. 1 Indiana on the ropes, and the clock ticking down under 10 seconds, he did what any good Butler Bulldog would do. He shot.
Barlow’s floater with 2.4 seconds left bounced off rim, backboard, rim again and in for an 88-86 overtime win, and Barlow became another underdog hero in a program that keeps churning them out.
Butler, where mid-major powerhouse is no oxymoron, is a place where underachievers achieve. It’s where a 5-foot-11 sophomore point guard, who might have been better suited to play college baseball, came to follow in the footsteps of its baby-faced coaching savant Brad Stevens.
Barlow has known since the first or second grade he wanted to coach, and on Dec. 15, he learned the power of what can happen when a coach instills confidence in a player, even one who had scored only 12 points in the previous nine games.
“People might have thought he drew it up for me, but I probably wouldn’t even have drawn up a play for myself in that situation,” said Barlow, who was drawing his own plays at age 6 and 7.
Barlow says he was the fourth or fifth option on that play, but he found space in the lane where Indiana backed off like it wasn’t convinced he would dare shoot. He did, though, knowing he had a coach who wasn’t going to ream him out for it either.
“Well, he had the ball,” Stevens explained, with a shrug in his voice. “And at the end of the day, the guy with the ball’s got to make the decision. … I think the thing that allows me to feel confident with Alex with the ball is I know how much he cares. I know how much it means to him. I know how much he studies it. I know how good he wants to be. Those things speak volumes when everything is on the line.”
Stevens knows that from finding Barlow shooting in Hinkle Fieldhouse after 10 p.m. some nights. He says Barlow watches more game film than anyone else on the team.
Stevens and Barlow are kindred spirits of sorts. Stevens, who played Division III basketball at DePauw, began his coaching career by quitting a job in pharmaceuticals to become a volunteer assistant at Butler. He was a basketball child prodigy, too, who used to tape games to watch when he was in kindergarten.
Barlow’s father, Tom, said when they moved to Springboro, Ohio, from Dayton, Ohio, when Alex was 6, Alex was upset to find out the new house didn’t get ESPN News. That was his favorite channel.
“Most kids are watching cartoons,” Tom Barlow said. “He would watch ESPN News and “Sports Center” over and over. … It’s like ‘Alex, that’s the same show you’ve watched three times.’”
He would memorize statistics about players and teams. He became somewhat of a novelty act, Tom said, for his dad’s friends and brothers.
“They’d come over and ask him sports questions or stats or situational things, and they’d get him all fired up and he would just go and go,” Barlow said. “Then they would get to go home. What they didn’t realize is I would still have to sit there and listen to, ‘Hey, Dad, what about this play, do you think this would work? Or what about this trade, you think this trade would work?’ He would wear me out.”
The difference between Barlow as a kid and Stevens, the coach said, is Stevens, who grew up in Zionsville, Ind., dreamt of being the next Reggie Miller. Barlow knew from a young age he wanted to coach.
“I’m not the most athletic kid,” Alex Barlow said. “I’m not the quickest kid. I just knew I wasn’t going to be 6-8. Don’t get me wrong, I love competing. I (just) knew that once I was done playing, the only option for me to stay in touch with the game was to go into coaching.”
Barlow’s father, a food-service rep for Pepsi, had always wanted to be a football coach, but didn’t pursue it. He instilled in his son an ethic to chase after coaching, if that was his dream.
“When I was a teenager, coaches didn’t make the same kind of money either at the high school level or beyond, so I don’t think a lot of people got encouraged to follow that path back then,” Tom Barlow said. “I could see the same (passion) in Alex. I just told him ‘Don’t be a doctor because people tell you you’re smart and you should do that.’”
Alex had a 4.0 GPA as a high school student and had the self-discipline that would make any coach proud. His father said that like clockwork, without needing encouragement from his parents, Tom and Tammy, Alex would come home and do his schoolwork so he could watch North Carolina basketball on TV or go to a Dayton game, where they had season tickets.
When it came time to find a college where he might walk on, his father said Alex researched it on his own and came up with Butler, a system that suited him, a good school with a history of playing walk-ons and a great young coach.
Now Alex is one of several teammates interested in coaching, which Stevens takes as a compliment.
“It’s fun to coach guys that want to coach because when you’re talking to them, they look different than some of the other guys,” Stevens said. “They’re not only ingesting what you’re saying in that moment; there are probably some thoughts going through their head about what they can take with them good and bad and use in the future.”
Stevens makes a point to give them extra attention in film work with the team or when he’s watching film on a flight.
“He’ll pause it and ask a couple of us, ‘Hey what do you think you should do in this situation?’” Barlow said.
Barlow has shown his coach a thing or two as well. In a game earlier this season, with 40 seconds left before halftime, Barlow let an inbounds pass bounce just long enough to eat five seconds off the game clock. Only 35 seconds remained when he retrieved the ball, so the shot clock was turned off and the other team wasn’t guaranteed another possession.
“That’s a smart kid who’s studied the game making a play that nobody would have talked about,” Stevens said.
With Barlow, it’s worth talking about. And for Stevens, plays like that made it worth rewarding him with a scholarship in January.
Stevens called Barlow into his office and presented it privately, which contrary to the attention he received after the Indiana game, is how Barlow prefers it.
“Alex doesn’t really like a lot of the attention,” Tom Barlow said. “But he said, ‘Dad, if people or other kids use my story as a motivation for them to follow their dreams, then I’m OK with people writing about it.’”
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