Last April, Trey Kaufman-Renn spoke to a collection of microphones held in front of him in Phoenix, wearing the fresh disappointment of the end of a dream.

Seated in his locker, an alcove just wider than his considerable shoulders, the Purdue forward was pensive as usual, but also spent and resigned. He nodded while staring at the floor in front of him. Pursed his lips. Blinked often.

He and his teammates climbed higher in the previous weeks than any others at their school in decades. Then they were swatted from the peak they’d been chasing, a 75-60 dismissal in the national final.

Some players will surely take time off now after a grueling season, Kaufman-Renn is saying. To reflect, to think. You’d assume he would be one of them, the team’s only philosophy major in at least a decade and prone to looking off into the distance when asked a question and scratching his chin like a Socrates sculpture. But he’s planning no such vacation.

“I have some things that I know I want to work on and improve,” he says.

The truth is that the 21-year-old forward was stagnating, even as his team climbed. He played some of his least effective games of the season as the Boilers etched history: a footnote, 2-point effort in Purdue’s all-timer against Tennessee in the Elite Eight, 6 points and two turnovers the round before. And then, in the greatest opportunity of his career in the championship, 4 points against two turnovers in 16 minutes, his slice of shortcoming in a defeat full of it.

So, once his feet were back on Indiana soil, he remained immersed in basketball. Jump shooting was an emphasis. “Growing up, I was always the biggest guy,” he says. “So no one taught me how to shoot.”

Not that he didn’t reflect, too. His transformation into Purdue’s top scorer and a First-Team All-Big Ten selection this season is rooted in the progression of his rare talent, yes, but also his rare mind.

His focus over the summer was a pursuit cliché for college students but often unexplored in reality, especially among basketball stars: He wanted to find himself. It had been a long time coming.

“If I’m the worst basketball player ever,” he quipped to a reporter his senior year of high school, “but the best version of me possible, that’s fine.”

The journey began nearly a year ago with a phone call from a Minneapolis hotel room.

It was meant to last 15 minutes. It stretched to two hours.

The person on the other end of the line was Jordan Delks, a self-described mindset guru, basketball coach and evangelist for a lifestyle that combines disciplined spirituality to, as Delks puts it, set the human spirit on fire.

According to Delks’ printed, laminated morning schedule, he typically wakes at 4:45 a.m. At 4:48, he drinks transparent prebiotic greens and pops a couple of apple cider vinegar gummies. He’s working out by 5:45.

“I'll get a text message at 4 a.m.,” Kaufman-Renn says. “He’ll be like, ‘Hey, it's JD. Just wanted to wish you a great day.’ He's probably running around the cornfield.”

The cornfield grows around a nondescript, white-painted farmhouse with a barn to match in Marian, Indiana. It’s Delks’ home base. In the trainer’s barn, tractors are out, basketball hoops in. He’s converted the entire inside to hardwood with his wife, Courtney, a former Purdue star whose 2010 Indiana Miss Basketball banner hangs on the wall.

He’s been coaching basketball since 2012, and coaching with a mindset at the center since 2020, when he felt the word was “whispered” to him.

“I get into your heart, and that’s been my niche,” Delks, 36, says. “I'm a mix between a basketball coach and a monk.”

Stars like Kaufman-Renn and pro players are some of his most public success stories, but he also trains the minds of Fortune 500 CEOs and high school hoopers, of whom there are plenty looking for an edge in the prep hotbed of Central Indiana.

On a Wednesday morning in January, at 6:30 when it’s dark and soggy and the teachers are still arriving at Harrison High School, the basketball team is arranged in front of him in the gym, lights blaring. As many as 40 sit in a crescent of metal chairs, some with hair still wet.

Delks grabs a canvas printout from a stack on the floor beside his whiteboard, wide as his 6-foot-2 wingspan.

“I say all the time when I’m training with TKR,” he says, referring to Kaufman-Renn, the person on the canvas, “embrace the physicality of the game. I want you to write that down.”

Forty pens scribble on legal pads. He goes on.

“Preparation equals confidence. … Adversity is life’s greatest teacher. … You guys think life happens to you. That’s simply not true. Life happens for you.”

Write that down, write that down, write that down.

He describes the mind, quoting Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman on his theory that 95% of decision-making is driven by the subconscious – “crazy.”

He says that’s why most players have such a difficult time moving beyond that awful shot, that no-show game, or become so preoccupied with the future they lose their way in the here and now.

Meditation and manifestation, he says, are the cures. Young faces stare, waiting for him to continue. Delks obliges.

“When I say those two words, sometimes I get looked at like I got an eyeball in the center of my forehead,” he says. “Manifestation means creation, and meditation means focus.”

That’s it, he says. That’s how you stay in the moment. That’s a step toward finding your “true north.”

Kaufman-Renn decided he’d go looking for his true north after he scored 1 point in 14 minutes in the Big Ten Tournament against Michigan State last season. It was among his worst outings of the year, and it continued a trend.

“That was probably the all-time low I've had in basketball, confidence-wise, in my game,” Kaufman-Renn says. “But just in myself, as a person.”

He was sulking in his hotel room afterward, staring at the ceiling. He mulled over his struggles, deciding he had the skill to be a star but lacked the confidence. He gave Delks a call.

To that point, Kaufman-Renn’s familiarity with Delks extended to a few basketball training sessions. But that night he decided he wanted to press further with the trainer, and in turn delve deeper within himself.

“He calls me,” Delks says. “He says, ‘I was planning on doing your mindset training at the end of the year, but how about we start right now?’”

Results came immediately. But Kaufman-Renn was far from cured.

The next day, against Wisconsin in the Big Ten Tournament semifinal, the forward had one of his best games of the season. “It’s kind of unfortunate we lost that game,” he says now.

He saw his performance coming. In warmups that day, he says he carried a steady confidence in who he was, or perhaps more accurately who he was committing to be. That identity had little to do with basketball.

Delks’ first session with Kaufman-Renn ingrained in the forward’s mind a belief that the game didn’t define him.

“You have things that matter to you outside, and then ‘Oh, you play basketball,’” Kaufman-Renn says. “It allows there not to be as much pressure.”

This may be Delks’ bedrock principle. He maintains that the more time players invest with him, the more basketball recedes from calling to hobby. The twist is that simultaneously, they’re supposed to improve on the court. He says the key is teaching a player to balance the areas of their life. After all, the 22 hours a day most players spend off the court far outweigh the time spent on it.

“Mind, body, spirit,” Delks says of his focuses. “If one of them's off, they’re all off.”

Once Purdue’s tournament run ended, the forward enrolled in Delks’ mindset program, which includes a curriculum of reading and habit-building. But he wanted more.

“JD always talks about burning the ships,” Kaufman-Renn says. Eschewing half measures, he got an idea.

What if there were a retreat, he proposed to Delks over lunch days after the National Championship, where a small group of basketball players learned from the trainer every day at the barn in Marion. They would blend mindset and basketball training in sessions that began with the sunrise and concluded well after dark. Books would be read, cold plunges taken, meditation and red light therapy done. Basketball would be crammed between, with a few summer camp activities (canoeing?) mixed in along the way.

It was admittedly audacious, out there even for Kaufman-Renn. The 22-year-old had thought of everything but a way to make it work. “You know, things cost money,” he says with a laugh.

That’s where faith came in. Delks and Kaufman-Renn are both born-again Christians, and the religion’s principles are inseparable from Delks’ beliefs about maximizing human potential. He likes to say a person is defined by their spirit, one which yearns for something outside the physical realm. He earned a master’s degree in theology from Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, where he coached for two years.

“We just started praying,” Delks says. “Almost praying for rain, like, how are we gonna put this thing together? We started knocking.” He paraphrases Scripture, from Matthew 7: “Ask, seek, knock, and the doors will be open unto you.”

Delks and Kaufman-Renn found a partner in a local college ministry, and donors to pay for housing, food, training and lodging for seven college players for 12 days. Their “roster,” as they termed it, included three Big Ten players and talent from Indiana to Europe.

Dates were set and flights booked. Kaufman-Renn’s dream was on its way to reality.

Delks’ Purdue connection precedes Kaufman-Renn. By a lot.

The trainer is a third-generation Purdue graduate in a line started by his grandfather, who came to West Lafayette by way of Hawaii in the 1950s.

Delks long dreamed of becoming a college basketball player before he starred at Purdue North Central (now Purdue Northwest), then transferred to Purdue’s main campus in 2011. There, he managed the men’s team under current coach Matt Painter, pursuing a coaching career. In a program that has long held education and character-building in high regard, he learned to see the game holistically.

“I lived in the basketball office,” he says. “I got a basketball doctorate from those guys.” Painter remembers him.

“He was one of the managers that you knew wasn’t doing it for fun,” the veteran coach says. “You could see he wanted to get into it.”

Delks’ relationship with the recent and current crop of Boilermakers – he’s trained Mason Gillis, Braden Smith, Brian Waddell, Will Berg, Kaufman-Renn, Sam King, Aaron Fine and Chase Martin – began with Gillis.

A mentor of Gillis’ introduced the former Purdue standout to Delks during what Gillis has said was the lowest point in his life: a DUI he was charged with as a freshman. Gillis credits Delks in the forward of the trainer’s book, which details his philosophy, with helping him turn that page. The two have been close friends since.

Gillis brought Kaufman-Renn to Delks after a day of pickup games in Indianapolis in the summer of 2023.

“He said something about going to Jordan’s afterwards,” Kaufman-Renn says. He remembers asking, “Who’s Jordan?”

Delks intrigued Kaufman-Renn from the beginning.

“He’s never been what I expected,” he says. “He's not a typical basketball trainer. He's one of those people that you have to just meet for yourself.”

Delks is positive, contagiously so. His texts favor fist bumps, prayer hands and thumbs-up emojis. He speaks loudly and smiles hard enough his eyes squint.

The trainer’s positivity isn’t the only thing you feel you could catch if you spent enough time around him: His beliefs bubble on the surface of his thoughts. He frequently quotes Scripture and other literature. After he shares a platitude (Example: “The future isn’t real.”), he smiles while you wait for an explanation, like he knows where the treasure’s buried but he’s not gonna tell you. Then he tells you.

Delks formed his curriculum mainly through practice and observation in a life spent at first as a hard-striving athlete and then around those of the same ilk. His philosophy is not so much a science as an art, tried and formed through years of experience.

He coached at a small private school, after leaving Purdue, for two years while he earned a master’s in organizational leadership. Then he joined the staff at Marion-based NAIA powerhouse Indiana Wesleyan and won a national championship with the Wildcats in 2016.

“My stock is as high as it’s ever been,” he says of the time.

He applied for three coaching jobs, one a head position. He counted Painter, former Purdue star turned broadcaster Robbie Hummel and former Purdue assistant and now-Notre Dame men’s coach Micah Shrewsberry as references. “And I got three runners-up in a row.”

Devastated, Delks fasted for a day while asking God for an explanation. He opened a journal from eighth grade (he’s never thrown one away) and flipped to a picture of a barn with a basketball court he had drawn all those years ago.

“I just got this whisper of player development,” he says. “I was like, ‘Man, I'm just gonna go up for it.’”

He bought the barn in Marion in 2017, joining his wife in the full-time personal training business. Called Compete Training Academy, their company has grown since – though not always steadily – adding trainers and locations when the fit feels right. Delks believes there’s a right and wrong way to attain progress and has decided his academy is more St. Elmo’s than McDonald’s.

The trainer’s client network also grew, giving Delks friends and devoted mentees in many cases. Besides Kaufman-Renn and fellow big man Berg, Delks came to know a Harrison star and Franklin College commit, players from a northern Indiana prep school and Ball State, and a local Marion star he’d trained since fifth grade. Delks saw a possible camp roster in his connections, but no such thing materialized.

“No. 11 on the top 10 things to do, I guess,” he says.

Enter Kaufman-Renn.

The first day of Camp Better, as it came to be called, began with a workout at 8 a.m.

Present were Kaufman-Renn, overseas pro Tayler Persons and former Rutgers standout Paul Mulcahy, who had messaged Delks a few weeks earlier about a training session and ultimately stayed a month in Marion.

Then they played three-on-three with the rest of the group before a barbecue that evening. A 60-degree Memorial Day nixed plans for a pool party, so they headed back to the barn for commencement.

There, ground rules were established. And everyone got an alarm clock.

Phones were to be prohibited for all but 90 minutes to two hours a day, so players would rise at 5:30 a.m. to that old-fashioned shrill of an electric alarm clock. Courtney Delks ran strength and conditioning at 6 – and if you weren’t 15 minutes early, you were late. If you were late, you didn’t work out. Those were the rules.

The campers were also required to meditate, practice grounding techniques, lie in a red light bed, sit in a 37-degree tub and sweat in a sauna every day. Again, the rules.

It was Kaufman-Renn’s idea of fun.

“Coach Painter, he always talks about when we play disciplined, we’re gonna have a lot of fun,” he says in one of Delks’ podcast episodes. “When we don’t, we’re not gonna have a lot of fun out there.”

The junior, a senior in his philosophy classes, has read Socrates and Plato’s ancient writings, which argue for an absolute moral truth. There’s a right way to live, Kaufman-Renn asserts, and many wrong ways.

Discipline “allows you to have fun,” he says. “It allows you to have a good time, and allows you to put everything into perspective.”

Twelve days flew by. The group lived split between two local Airbnb’s, joined at the hip and without distraction. The hardest part for Kaufman-Renn was waking up.

“I’ve done it before at spurts throughout my life,” he says, meaning 5 a.m. mornings. “But to do it pretty much every day, I just think it's a game changer.”

They ate shrimp and steak and mashed potatoes and chicken and mac and cheese. And, for dessert every night, watermelon.

There was a beach workout and meditation, and even that canoeing trip.

“Not to defame anyone,” Berg says, “but Trey is an overrated canoer. I had to compensate for his side every time.” Kaufman-Renn maintains his job was steering.

The group laughed until they cried. “I don't remember when that happened last,” Berg says.

“Trey is just a goof,” one camper says on the podcast. “Like, you can't have a serious conversation without Trey smiling, laughing. He's either gonna make a joke, or he's gonna laugh. His laugh is just contagious.”

When it was over, they gathered around and said their goodbyes and shipped out.

Kaufman-Renn stayed.

Delks has a phrase about getting away.

“I like to say change of place, change of pace gives you a change of perspective.”

Kaufman-Renn spent his summer 7.5 miles from the nearest McDonald’s. There was a Subway a little closer. Before and after Camp Better, when he wasn’t needed in West Lafayette, he was in Marion with Delks.

Delks remembers when he showed up in April. He remembers his eyes.

“The hunger and fire in his eyes – I like to say the eyes are the gateway of the soul – were unmatched from anybody I've ever seen,” Delks says. “He was like, ‘Dude, I'm all in. I want to transform my life.’”

Kaufman-Renn told Delks that if this didn’t happen now, it never would. So they got started.

His lifestyle during that time was much the same as during the 12 days of camp, if a notch lower in intensity. A few hours of basketball in the morning, then yoga, plyometrics, weight training. Delks estimates the Purdue forward worked out four to five hours a day.

He spent the rest of the time reading.

“He's reading, like, the whole Bible,” Delks says. “He's reading books. He's a philosophy major, man. That was his jam. Just chill.”

There’s another thing Delks likes to say, about adversity. He compares it to a chrysalis, the constructed shelter a caterpillar forms from its own skin when it becomes a butterfly.

“A caterpillar literally sheds its skin, its former self,” Delks says. “Eats its skin – kinda graphic – to become a beautiful new creation, a butterfly.”

Kaufman-Renn emerged from the barn in Marion different, that much is clear. You might even call him a new creation.

His assists doubled, his points more than tripled, his efficiency rose. He was more relied upon to score than anyone in the Big Ten, going by usage rate.

That’s just basketball, though. Braden Smith says he’s a different person and teammate now. That now he’s more apt to take a night out with the guys instead of scheduling a date with a book. Maybe it takes one to know one: Smith himself is a self-professed introvert. But he sees it. Trey’s more vocal now: “I think there's a huge change.”

Kaufman-Renn says he has a stone, a belief that will remain even when life spins and shakes. Last summer he answered what for him are the two most important questions in the world: “Who is God, and who are we because of who he is?”

Friday marked one year since the Purdue forward and senior in philosophy called Delks from his hotel room. Since, he’s become the trainer’s No. 1 client, tied with Gillis.

Delks has kept track.

“One weekly mindset session with me and he has not missed one.”

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