Growing up in his parents’ house, Javon Pickett stirred awake nearly every morning between 4 and 4:30 a.m. His father, Jeff Pickett, woke up around then to get ready for work, and Javon remembers hearing Jeff leave the house, then rolling over and going back to sleep. Rather than feeling thankful he still had time to slumber before his own alarm sounded or shuddering at the thought of leaving the house so early, Javon remembers being disappointed. He felt he was wasting valuable time, time he’d rather spend practicing basketball, but the gym at his high school wasn’t yet unlocked.
“I just wished, like, man, I wish I could do something, go to the gym or something like that. Be productive,” the Missouri freshman said. “But I just would sleep.”
Now that Javon has round-the-clock access to a practice facility, he has taken advantage of those early morning hours, as well as evening hours and free time between classes. Javon said he typically wakes up around 5 a.m., often without setting an alarm. Throughout the summer and the fall, Javon's teammates and coaches described arriving to the team’s practice facility for a workout and finding him already there, putting himself through defensive drills, or leaving after an afternoon practice only to have Javon remain to shoot jump shots.
It’s been that work ethic, as well as the relentless personality that drives it, that has spurred Javon, a three-star prospect who had to attend a year of prep school to land another Power Five offer after he withdrew his commitment to Illinois, to emerge as a reliable contributor for Missouri this season. Javon has started each of the team’s 18 games so far this season, and he ranks fourth on the team in minutes and fifth in scoring at 8.1 points per game.
“Javon’s always been just a blue-collar guy,” said sophomore guard Mark Smith, who played on the same AAU team as Pickett prior to college. “He’s going to work hard. You can see his play on the court, he’s always playing as hard as he possibly can, and I think that’s just how he is. He doesn’t know any other way.”
Of the five scholarship players Missouri added to its roster during the offseason who have played this year, Javon was probably the least celebrated. The Belleville, Illinois native didn’t crack the top 250 in the Rivals rankings, and he hadn’t played in a basketball game in about a year when he arrived on Missouri’s campus. Reports during the preseason that he could crack the starting lineup elicited surprise from some fans.
Even Jeff admitted he was pleasantly surprised when his son called him shortly before the team’s season-opener and said he thought he might start. But Jeff wasn’t surprised to hear Missouri head coach Cuonzo Martin rave about Javon's work ethic virtually every time he addressed the media.
Javon started playing basketball around the age of six, and even from a young age, Jeff said, he exhibited an unusual love for the game. He would spend hours working on his ball-handling in the family garage and beg his parents to drive him to a gym whenever one was open. Jeff Creek, who worked as an assistant coach at Belleville East high school while Javon played there and now serves as the head coach, remembers Javon asking him to come unlock the gym in the evenings so he could work on his game.
“He would have lived in the gym if he could have,” Creek said. “… He’d get in any time we were available. He was always wanting to get into the gym and get shots up.”
“Before he started driving, he used to worry me to death, you know, ‘Can we go to the gym? I want to go do this, I want to go do that,’” Jeff Pickett said with a laugh. “I was so glad when he was old enough to get his driver’s license.”
Javon played on the junior varsity team at Belleville East as a freshman, but as a sophomore, he started to make a name for himself. He averaged 14 points and six rebounds per game in his first varsity season. The following year, he took another step forward, averaging 24 points and six boards per game. Colleges began to take notice, specifically Illinois. Javon developed a strong bond with former Illini coach John Groce, and he committed to Illinois in January of his junior year of high school.
Even though he had another productive season as a senior at Belleville East, averaging more than 25 points per game, Javon didn’t consider offers from other schools. He was set on attending Illinois. Then, in March of 2017, Groce got fired and replaced by Brad Underwood, and Javon suddenly had to reconsider his plan.
“Once Groce left and all that stuff happened, I just felt like maybe it was somewhere else that I needed to be,” Javon explained. “I just followed my gut.”
Javon withdrew his commitment to Illinois in April, but that left him with only a few months to find a new college fit. A few mid-major schools expressed interest, but Javon felt he possessed Power Five talent. He just needed to wait until the next recruiting cycle, when teams had more open scholarships. That prompted the difficult decision to attend Sunrise Christian Academy, a prep school in Wichita, Kansas, for a year.
“It wasn’t really something that I was looking forward to, going far away from home,” Javon admitted of the decision to attend Sunrise. “My parents just told me it was something that I gotta do for a little while and then it’ll work out for me.”
At Sunrise, Javon said, he and his teammates didn’t have cars, but he would bike to the practice facility and work out in his spare time. That is, until one preseason practice, when his left shoulder popped out of place during a rebounding drill. He suffered a torn labrum, which required surgery and forced him to miss the entire season. Afterward, he left Sunrise and returned to Belleville to undergo rehab.
For a while after the surgery, all Javon could do was lift weights with his lower body and lie in bed, flicking a basketball with his right hand to work on his shooting release. (He spent most of his time binge-watching the TV show Grey’s Anatomy.) Jeff believes having to attend prep school in order to land a spot at a Power Five school motivated his son to prove he belonged. After the injury, his hunger to work on his game further increased, as he felt like his development lagged behind his peers in the 2018 recruiting class.
“I think after he had to go to prep school, he was looking like where everyone went and where he should be, where he felt he should have been, and that was his goal to get there,” Jeff said. “... He was jumping the gun, like ready before the doctor had released him. He really felt like he was behind a little bit.”
Prior to his shoulder injury, Javon had committed to Missouri, a school that met all of his criteria. Javon had known Martin for years, even before Martin got the Missouri job (he said Martin is an uncle to one of his best friends), he knew a few other players on the roster from the St. Louis area and the school was close enough to home for his family to regularly attend games. But Javon knew he would have to adapt his game in order to contribute as a freshman. In high school, he was known as a slasher and a scorer. Martin’s system values defense and rebounding more than offensive production, and three-point shooting ability is a plus.
Javon said his biggest emphases when he arrived at Missouri were to adjust his diet, add strength to his 6-foot-4 frame and improve his defense. In order to get better defensively, he did exercises to improve his balance and his agility, especially in his hips. He also put himself through drills on his own time.
“It may sound a little weird,” Javon said, “but just setting up cones and just zig-zagging throughout the court, it helps a lot.”
Creek noted Javon's improved defense and strength since high school, but Martin believes his three-point shooting has been an even bigger revelation. Javon has made 19 three-pointers on the year. He’s shot 34 percent from three on the season, though his numbers have been hurt a bit by shooting one-for-eight during the last two games, when he was dealing with back spasms,.
“I think the biggest area for him is his three-point shot and the consistency of his three-point shot,” Martin said when asked what area of his game Javon has improved most since arriving on campus. “Because when he shoots his three-point shot and his feet are set, I think it’s going in.”
Characteristic of a freshman, Javon has had some ups and downs in his first college campaign. But, when the lights have been brightest, Pickett seems to have come through with his best performances. During Missouri’s overtime win over Central Florida in November, Javon set what a then-career high with 13 points, plus logged four rebounds and three assists. After being greeted by boos in the pregame introductions in Missouri’s annual Braggin’ Rights game against Illinois, he cleared that bar. He scored 16 points on seven-of-eight shooting against the school to which he was once committed, not missing a shot until the game’s final minutes.
Javon said he’s always enjoyed playing against high-profile opponents and in raucous atmospheres. Andre McMurray, who coached Pickett for the Jets-Ramey United AAU team, remembers one game in the summer of 2016, when his team was facing an Iowa Barnstormers squad that featured a handful of players bound for Division I colleges. Javon Pickett had one of his best games of the summer, and Ramey-Jets won.
“He just absolutely torched the Iowa Barnstormers,” McMurray said. “And it’s just the bigger it is, the higher-ranked a kid is, the bigger the moment — Javon, he’s just a special kid. And the thing I like about him is not just always scoring. He does so many little bitty things. It’s just defensively, the rebounds, the putbacks.”
Like much of Javon's success, Martin chalks up his composure in big moments to his personality and his work ethic.
“What makes him good is he relies on his assignments, he carries out those assignments to the best of his ability,” Martin said. “So, again, when he breaks down, he can adjust quickly, because he reverts back to here’s the game plan, here’s the scouting report, here’s what I worked on.”
Jeff doesn’t want to take credit for his son’s work ethic, instead attributing Javon's motor to his love for the game. He doesn’t remember ever suggesting that his son work on his skills outside of basketball practice or pushing Javon to spend more time in the gym. But Javon credited his parents for instilling his drive. He reflected back to all the mornings he heard his father leave the house before 5 a.m., pointing to them as an example of the dedication necessary to achieve success. And once he knew someone else was awake and working, sleep didn’t appeal to Javon, lest another player already be out of bed and in the gym, shooting jumpers or zig-zagging through cones.
“I always saw (my parents) wake up and go in to work in the morning, things like that, even when they didn’t want to,” Javon said. “Like when I didn’t want to work out, that gave me a boost, just thinking of them, that I gotta go put it in, because my parents, they go to work and they don’t complain, so I can’t complain about doing this.”
