Purdue star Trey Kaufman-Renn heads to the 'middle of nowhere' to sharpen skills and mind alike

SWEETSER, Ind. — Heavily industrialized and historically basketball-rich Marion is just a few miles away, but you’d never know it standing outside the barn where one of the top players in college basketball is spending a chunk of his spring discretionary time.

It’s here at Compete Training Academy. owned and operated by Jordan Delks and Courtney (Moses) Delks, the former Purdue women’s basketball star, that for the second year in a row, Trey Kaufman-Renn is co-hosting what they call “Camp Better,” a training retreat focused on skill development, mental and spiritual acuity, etc.

Kaufman-Renn and 10 other players of varying levels of college basketball are living in a pair of Airbnb properties in Marion, spending their days here on the Delks’ two-acre property, training their bodies and sharpening their skills, but also taking an almost academic approach to topics such as mental toughness, poise, personal consistency and spiritual elements that might apply to athletic performance..

There’s a generations-old barn, long ago home to livestock, with a half-court training area and a retrofitted conference room, the walls in the court area adorned with Courtney Delks’ high school and Purdue memorabilia and photos of some of the players who’ve come through the facility, many of them associated with Purdue.

Outside, a pole barn with another half court, the space where this year’s 11 participants first convened on Sunday afternoon.

Between the two structures, a gravel parking lot bordered by old farm-equipment tires and open space all-around. Out front, there’s a decommissioned blue pick-up truck loaded up with flowers and old basketballs.

“I love it,” Kaufman-Renn said, pointing out the open barn door toward the farmland that runs up to the Delks’ property. “I love how open it is. I feels like it really is a retreat. We get to lock into our minds and basketball. It’s my favorite thing.”

It was this “middle of nowhere” atmosphere that drew Kaufman-Renn to the Delks’ property and was part of the origin story of the camp, the brainchild of Kaufman-Renn himself.

It was last March when Purdue had just beaten Michigan State in the Big Ten Tournament in Minneapolis that Kaufman-Renn reached out to Jordan Delks to discuss the off-season to come. Kaufman-Renn didn’t play great against the Spartans and considering the opportunity that would lie ahead for him post-Zach Edey, he’d already begun thinking about improvement, which he felt would lie in his mindset. He was going to wait ’til the end of the season to start plotting his off-season plan, but his 14-minute, 0-for-4 showing against the Spartans didn’t sit well.

So he called Delks, a Rossville native who played at Purdue-Northwest before transferring to the West Lafayette campus and serving as a manager for Matt Painter’s staff in 2011, to discuss mindset training. Kaufman-Renn had earlier connected with Delks via Mason Gillis and other Purdue players who’d worked with him.

Almost immediately after the national title game, Kaufman-Renn shipped off to Marion’s countryside to begin his first iteration of Camp Better, the participants of which again this year are sponsored by members of the community.

Now, after preparation plus opportunity equaled an All-America-level season for Kaufman-Renn, he’s doing it all over again.

“He’s a special kid,” Jordan Delks said, “who wants to maximize this opportunity he has at Purdue.”

Skill development will matter to Kaufman-Renn again, of course — he’s also been working with well-regarded trainer LaSalle Thompson (P.J. and Isaiah’s father) on his shooting — but on the verge of one of the most-anticipated seasons in school history, his mind is again on, well, his mind.

“You’re really fighting yourself,” said Kaufman-Renn, who’ll be a preseason All-America pick. “It’s cliché to say that, but you are. I’m coming off a a good personal season. But there are so many goals I have. I want to win a national championship. And how I was last year — too much fouling, too much this, that or the other — didn’t get it done.

“You go back and look at that and look back at certain games and think, ‘If I wasn’t so emotion-filled during this possession and I didn’t get this foul, maybe I could have stayed in the game, stayed on the floor a little longer and maybe that’s one more (win)’ When I look at that, it’s just about staying present, staying in the moment and just keep building on the habits I’ve already built.”