Master's alum Joey Fuca leads Prolific Prep to a prestigious title

Residents of the Santa Clarita Valley opened their newspapers one morning in November 2009 to find the piercing stare of a point guard plastered across the sports section.

Graduation had left The Master’s University men’s basketball team in need of a go-to guy, and The Signal’s feature story made clear the search began and ended with junior Joey Fuca.

“He’s the quintessential point guard,” Thomas Millar, then a Master’s senior, told the paper. “He doesn’t just have the skill set. He has the leadership ability, too.”

Fuca went on to enjoy his finest season as a Mustang, earning All-Golden State Athletic Conference honors and shooting 45 percent from three. He produced career highs in points and assists.

As it turns out, it wouldn’t be the last vacancy Fuca would seamlessly fill with a combination of smarts and competitive drive. The latest example came this season as he led one of the nation’s premier high school basketball academies to a prestigious championship in his first year on the job.

Fuca, 31, knew everything that came with accepting the head coaching position at Prolific Prep in Napa, California — the heat of a national spotlight, the responsibility of guiding ESPN’s No. 1 prospect through his final days of high school, the complexity of mentoring a multinational roster. But that didn’t make traveling the country with a team of teenage all-stars, tailed by a documentary crew, any less surreal for the 2011 Master’s graduate.

Prolific Prep featured two McDonald’s All-Americans and players from seven countries. They played in eight states, twice appeared on ESPN and finished ranked seventh or ninth in the country, depending on which MaxPreps.com poll you favor.

The season culminated last month in Benton, Kentucky, with a 95-80 win over Our Savior Lutheran (NY) in the final of the Grind Session World Championship, a contest that crowned the winner of a league with 26 teams from across the United States and Canada.

It was the brightest moment in the incredible six-year history of Prolific Prep, which partners with Napa Christian to groom elite high school basketball players for the next level both on the court and in the classroom.

The basketball team attends classes and chapel at Napa Christian and, during the season, crisscrosses the country seeking out challenging competition wherever it can be found. Prolific Prep played 34 games, almost all of them at neutral sites, and lost just three times, all by single digits. The team’s final two wins — in the semifinals and championship at Grind Session — occurred in a matter of several hours in order to beat the coronavirus shot clock.

All the while, Overtime, a New York City-based sports network, followed the team to film a documentary scheduled for release on YouTube later this month. Fuca enjoyed “every minute” of the season, but that’s not to say the pressure didn’t weigh on him.

“It was a great feeling,” Fuca said, “although I constantly felt on edge because that was a reason to win that much more. You had a documentary, you had the No. 1 player in the country on your team, you had a target on your back because every time you play, you have thousands of people watching you and expecting you to win.”

Fuca’s basketball resume suggests he was prepared to handle a season like this.

After graduating from Master’s, where he joined the 1,000-point club, Fuca played two seasons as a pro in Europe, becoming, at the time, the 20th Mustang to move on to the professional ranks, a number that has since grown to 23.

Fuca was a star in Germany in 2012-2013, averaging 23 points per game for the Vilsbiburg Baskets.

“After the last game, I was signing autographs for families for about an hour,” Fuca told The Mercury News at the time. “Kids were coming up to me left and right. It was a surreal experience.”

Upon returning to the U.S., Fuca accepted a graduate assistant position on the coaching staff at the University of Nevada, Reno, where head coach Eric Musselman tabbed him a “rising star” in the school’s news release. Fuca soaked up Musselman’s approach to coaching, a highlight being the way Musselman motivated his players with film of NBA players boxing out and diving for loose balls. The message was clear: No one was above doing the dirty work.

The taste of working with high-level athletes left Fuca hungry to coach again at the NCAA Division 1 or professional level, and that is, in part, why he accepted the gig at Prolific Prep.

In its brief history, the program had positioned itself not only as a springboard for the careers of its players, but also for its coaches, says Prolific Prep co-director Philippe Doherty.

Doherty had known the Fucas for years. He coached against the family’s Bay Area AAU program, Lakeshow, and found the Fucas to be “really good human beings who really, really like the sport of basketball” and invested in their kids.

It didn’t hurt that Doherty felt Joey possessed an uncommon mix of intelligence and competitive drive.

“When you have people who are talented and really like their craft and really want to coach, for us it was kind of a no-brainer,” Doherty said.

In assessing Fuca’s contributions to a Prolific Prep team that featured Jalen Green (ESPN’s No. 1 prospect for the 2020 class) and Nimari Burnett (the No. 21 prospect), Doherty stressed that coaching a squad with otherworldly talent isn’t as easy as “rolling the ball out.”

“It’s kind of like in the NBA,” said Doherty, who played collegiately at NCAA Division 1 Santa Clara University. “You spend time game planning and then you spend time psychoanalyzing your roster, figuring out how they tick and how they feel and how they mold together.”

Doherty believes Prolific Prep benefitted most from Fuca’s level of investment. The team appreciated that Fuca was “all in” even as he and his wife, Kelly, raised their two young children, one of whom, daughter Collins, was born during the season.

“Joey said, ‘Let’s go. I’m going to roll up my sleeves and we’re going to figure out a way to get this done,’” Doherty says.

A focal point of Fuca’s approach was building relationships with his athletes off the court. That method established trust and gave the players a window into his motivation when he held them accountable after a mistake.

"That’s what really good coaches are,” Fuca says. “They have a way of relating to their players that isn’t necessarily always getting yelled at. Our staff did a really good job of relating to the guys.”

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. It was, after all, the relationships Fuca formed at Master’s that remain most vivid when he thinks about his time on the Newhall, California, campus. Whether it was with his team’s assistant coach Chris Connolly; his resident director Dave Hulet, now TMU’s dean of men; or with teammates like Ryan Zamroz.

It was Zamroz, TMU’s leading scorer during Fuca’s freshman and sophomore seasons, who Fuca replaced as the Mustangs’ go-to guy as a junior. They have remained in touch over the years, with Zamroz (another Mustang to go pro), offering advice on navigating professional basketball in Europe.

Even now, Zamroz says Fuca was one of his favorite point guards to play with because of Fuca’s work ethic and pass-first mentality.

Zamroz, for one, isn’t surprised Fuca transitioned so successfully into a high-profile coaching role.

“He’s played with and been around a lot of high-level basketball thinkers and players and his exposure to the game is really high,” Zamroz says. “Being a point guard and a floor general has made the way he thinks about the game better, and having the overseas experience, that helps in building your basketball knowledge. He eats, sleeps and drinks it. He’s a student of the game.”