Johnell Davis’s Cinderella Story Was Perfect Fit for FAU Men’s Basketball

Akeem Miskdeen remembers the moment he realized Johnell Davis was exactly what Florida Atlantic’s basketball program needed.

Long before Davis was the face of college basketball’s 2023 Cinderella story and a potential All-American, he was an underrecruited, slightly undersized kid from the projects of Gary, Ind., who couldn’t quite break through into national prominence. His AAU team featured a future top-five NBA draft pick (Jaden Ivey) and players headed to Purdue, Louisville, Kansas State and Pittsburgh, but Davis somehow was sliding under the radar.

Miskdeen, now with the Georgia Bulldogs but who was an assistant coach at FAU at the time, had been tracking Davis for years after seeing him while recruiting another player from his high school, 21st Century Charter, and had fallen in love with his game. But one phone call sealed his opinion of the soft-spoken guard with a playground-style game.

“I remember calling him and he’s in the gym,” Miskdeen says. “I said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I’m doing my homework,’ and I said, ‘I hear basketballs bouncing, how are you doing your homework?’ ”

Davis had a simple explanation.

“I go shoot, I do my homework, I go shoot. I’m just taking a break with my shooting,” Miskdeen recalls Davis explaining.

This dude really loves basketball, Miskdeen thought.

A rare work ethic alone wasn’t enough for Miskdeen (or anyone else, for that matter) to predict just how transformational Davis would become for the FAU program, but it was an essential ingredient to what head coach Dusty May was trying to build. May was overseeing a program with almost no history of success, with seven straight sub-.500 seasons prior to his arrival in 2018. He believed he needed players who were obsessed with basketball and possessed the same drive to be great that he had, not players picking FAU for its proximity to palm trees. Davis fit that mold, and May knew he had to have him.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve never been around someone more competitive, who wants to win, has the drive to win that he does,” May says.

The Owls put on a full-court press. They prioritized Davis for an early official visit during his junior year, but Miskdeen, his primary recruiter, was petrified of his recruitment blowing up as Davis continued to play well that summer. Even if bigger schools didn’t jump in, FAU feared more regional schools in the Mid-American and Missouri Valley conferences would swoop in.

But trust was everything for Davis. He’s the baby of an incredibly close-knit family, with two older brothers and an older sister who, along with his parents, helped shelter him from the struggles they faced in Gary, a city with a poverty rate over 32% according to recent census data that in 2019 was labeled the most miserable city in the United States.

“It had always been just us,” his sister, Jaunesia, 30, says. “We didn’t even know that we were in the projects … We were less fortunate, but we didn’t know that we were less fortunate because of our family.”

So while the scene of a coach coming into a family’s home to seal the deal on why their son should come play for them has been portrayed plenty of times before, it had extra meaning to the Davises when May came to Gary. May took in one of Johnell’s high school games, then had dinner in their living room.

“That is how FAU gained our trust because [Johnell] didn’t have a lot of visits, but when we [talked] to head coaches, coaches weren’t as welcoming as the recruiting staff,” Jaunesia Davis says. “Dusty was in our living room.”

Once Johnell officially committed, the trust that started being built on the recruiting trail blossomed into an incredibly close relationship with his coach. It took time for Davis to get comfortable, especially at a school more than 1,300 miles from home, but he stayed the course, and the bond he built with May was a huge reason why.

“In practice, [May] was being hard on me from my freshman year,” Davis says. “Just being on me, on and off the court, in school … being that guy I can call any time I want.”

Success wasn’t immediate: He played fewer than 10 minutes per game as a freshman, then saw incremental growth as a sophomore but still came off the bench and played less than half the game. Especially in today’s college basketball, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see Davis enter the transfer portal. Instead, he showed trust in his head coach, biding his time through a COVID-19–impacted 13–10 campaign in the 2020–21 season and a 19–15 season in 2021–22.

“In life, you ain’t always gotta be so quick to get good things,” Davis says. “You can be patient sometimes.”

Also keeping him in Boca Raton, Fla., was his relationship with the rest of a four-man freshman class, one that also featured future Final Four starters Alijah Martin and Nick Boyd along with role-playing center Giancarlo Rosado. Davis and Rosado lived together during their freshman year, with Boyd and Martin in the dorm directly below them regularly complaining that they made too much noise while playing Madden. With COVID restrictions keeping players somewhat sheltered from the outside world that year, the four built an incredible friendship, all built on their love for basketball. With gym access limited, they’d play pickup basketball on outdoor courts on and around campus to pass the time. Matchups between the freshmen and upperclassmen were highly competitive, with the youngsters winning their fair share.

“They were going at each other’s heads,” Miskdeen recalls.

Most of those veterans graduated after the 2021–22 season. Veteran rotation guard Michael Forrest used his bonus year of eligibility to come back for one more go, but outside of him, it was now the young guys’ team. Davis had a big breakthrough early, scoring 18 points and snatching 10 rebounds in a November road win at Florida that boosted FAU’s confidence that it could compete at the highest level. He later had 36 points in a January win over UAB and averaged nearly 17 points per game in the Conference USA tournament. He also had some huge performances during FAU’s Cinderella run to the Final Four, headlined by 29 points, 12 rebounds and five assists in the second round vs. Fairleigh Dickinson in a game that he still considers his favorite moment from that remarkable run through March.

Still, there’s a bitter taste in Davis’s mouth about how that season ended. He scored just eight points on 2 of 9 shooting in the team’s Final Four game against San Diego State, and in the closing seconds, he had his shot partially blocked. That play set up Lamont Butler’s now-famous buzzer-beating jump shot that ended the Owls’ dream season. Davis tested the NBA draft waters and played well at the G League Elite Camp in Chicago last May but always had his sights set on giving it one more go with the Owls’ nucleus.

“He has embraced and acknowledged areas that haven't been his strengths and he has worked diligently to improve those,” May says. “He has stared them face down and went after them. All last March did was motivate him to be even better. Any negative is a growth opportunity and every positive, he stays humble. The good and the bad, he turns it into motivation to work.”

The result has been a monster senior year, one that has seen Davis blossom from a cog in a well-oiled Owls machine into the unquestioned star and one of the best players in college basketball. He has seen his scoring average rise from just under 14 points per game to nearly 19 per contest, and he’s shooting a ridiculous 48% from three on two makes per game. His rebounding, assist and steal totals have also all climbed. His 35 points against Arizona in Las Vegas during the Owls’ signature win was one of the best single-game performances by any player this season. He has scored 28 or more points in three of his last five games, capped by a buzzer-beating three to bail out FAU against North Texas last weekend. He was just named to the top-10 candidates for the Jerry West Award for the nation’s best shooting guard. Plus, FAU has stayed in the AP Top 25 every week this season, thanks in no small part to Davis’s contributions.

Off the floor, he has used his newfound stardom to impact the community, especially in Gary. He hosted basketball camps each of the last two summers and saw the event grow by more than 20 attendees last year after the Final Four run. Back in Boca Raton, he hosted a food drive in the spring, collecting more than 1,600 pounds of food for Boca Helping Hands.

But most impactful to him off the floor is a cause that hits close to home. Jaunesia’s son, DeYaire, was diagnosed with autism while Davis was still in high school. Davis wore an autism awareness–themed outfit to his high school graduation and dedicated his graduation party to his nephew. Jaunesia has since been active in the autism community in Gary, opening the first applied behavioral analysis therapy clinic in the community to provide special education services not provided in the region’s schools called We Are The Village. Jaunesia says Davis has given “a bunch” of his NIL money to help the program thrive.

“He’s really the best uncle to my children ever,” Jaunesia Davis says. “He’s a compassionate, understanding, genuine person. He cares not just about himself but his community.”

The last 365 days have been a whirlwind for Davis and FAU. A year ago, the Owls were just emerging into the casual college basketball fan’s consciousness, an intriguing potential mid-major team to watch in the following month’s NCAA tournament. Now, Davis is a household name in the sport, anchor of one of the great Cinderella stories ever and back for more this season. But the core values of what turned Davis into FAU’s transformational talent haven’t changed, despite all that has shifted around him. The player who once used getting shots up as a break from his homework hasn’t ditched the extra shooting sessions for trips to the beach enjoying his newfound celebrity.

“He hasn’t changed who he is,” May says. “He still has the same foundation, the same game he has had since Day 1. He has just built on it. And as a person, he has only grown. He’s so loyal to his family and his friends and our program.”