Calumet junior Johnnie Hudson seems to have come out of nowhere.
Growing up, Hudson played a little basketball in church leagues, but he didn’t start taking it at all seriously until eighth grade. This is the 6-foot-4 guard/forward’s second season of affiliated basketball with school teams.
So Calumet coach Aaron Mercer hesitates to put a limit on Hudson’s potential.
“His ceiling is so high as far as what he can become, you can’t even predict,” Mercer said. “And don’t get me wrong, right now in the present, he’s helped us tremendously.”
Indeed, Hudson is averaging 15.1 points and team highs of 7.4 rebounds and 1.4 blocked shots after Calumet’s loss at Illiana Christian on Thursday night. He put up career highs of 33 points and 13 rebounds during the Warriors’ victory against Calumet Christian on Monday.
“I’m way more aggressive and confident this year,” Hudson said. “Confidence — even though I had the green light last year, my first year, I was still worried about what my teammates were going to say. But confidence really helped me this year.”
Overall, Hudson has been instrumental in Calumet’s success. The loss to Illiana Christian cost the Warriors (8-8, 5-2) a share of the Greater South Shore Conference title with Bishop Noll, but they had 10 wins in the previous two seasons combined.
“The steps he’s taken is unbelievable,” Mercer said. “This kid is in the gym. We practice at 8 a.m. every Saturday — he’s here at 6. Right after school, on game days, he’s in the gym getting hundreds of shots up. He works on his game constantly.”
Hudson said he moved to Calumet to live with his father John, who is in his ninth season as an assistant for the Warriors, before sophomore year after having lived with his mother in the Indianapolis area.
“This is his second year of high school basketball ever,” Mercer said. “He never played basketball, organized basketball, period. So he’s only going to get better.”
John Hudson graduated from Roosevelt in 1999, and Mercer coached against him as an assistant at Clark and Griffith. When Mercer took over the Warriors in 2021, he retained John Hudson on the staff.
John Hudson said he didn’t push Johnnie to play basketball.
“He’s always been around basketball,” John Hudson said. “But I saw him in March right before his ninth grade year, toward the end of his eighth grade year, in Fishers. I was just supporting him, and for somebody who’s never been coached and really never played the game, I was like, ‘We might have something here.’ I didn’t tell him. I was just watching.
“I didn’t really focus on points. I was just watching toughness and effort. Then I noticed how he was moving, and he was always in the right spot. He was kind of the catalyst of the team. At the end of the game, he had 11 and 10 or 15 and eight. Those are pretty good numbers for someone who’s never played. For three weekends straight, I was watching his development, and I had a conversation with his mom, like, ‘We might not have to pay for college. We have something here.’”
John Hudson wound up putting together a travel team in the Chicagoland area, and Johnnie played.
“Since he was still going to school in Indianapolis, he was just coming home on the weekends,” John Hudson said. “He was still giving me good numbers with no practice, coming off the bench.”
As a freshman, Johnnie Hudson attended Avon, where he didn’t make the team.
“I wasn’t as good as I am now,” he said. “I just started taking it personally. I was in the gym a lot. I was in the weight room a lot.”
After his freshman year, Johnnie Hudson decided the timing was right to head to Calumet.
“The whole idea was his to come on out here,” John Hudson said. “He always knew I would love for that to happen.
“Me and his mom had a conversation, and he had already been reaching out to me saying he was ready to come on out here. We decided he would do the rest of his high school years here. He came out here his sophomore year and just hit the ground running.”
Johnnie Hudson averaged 10.1 points and 4.4 rebounds for Calumet last season. Still, it wasn’t totally smooth sailing for him. There was an adjustment process.
“It was a new everything,” he said. “Even the way they play out here is more aggressive. But we decided this would be the best choice for me.”
Johnnie Hudson also was dealing with a left knee injury during summer and fall workouts going into his sophomore season. It contributed to him coming off the bench.
But after he scored 11 points against Victory Christian and 16 points against Bishop Noll in the first two games, it was clear he was healthy and productive enough to crack the starting lineup.
“He made it hard for us not to start him,” John Hudson said.
Now Johnnie Hudson is making it hard for the Warriors to take him off the court at all.
“His game, he does it all,” Mercer said. “He’s just an overall basketball player. … He is a legitimate college prospect.”
Johnnie Hudson’s defense is no less impressive than his offense.
“He’s very long,” Mercer said. “When he plays defense, it’s hard to get around him. He can guard the guards out top. He can guard the big men down low.
“I can put him in situations sometimes where I know he’s uncomfortable just because I know he can do it. I’ll put him at the top of a 1-2-2 trap. I’ll put him at the bottom of a 2-3 zone.”
Johnnie Hudson said academics kept him from playing before high school.
“My grades were bad, so I never could play on any school team,” he said. “I was really just going to the gym and playing basketball, going outside.”
But Johnnie Hudson has done a 180 in the classroom.
“He’s a straight-A student,” Mercer said. “I’ll give that credit to his father because he doesn’t play when it comes to grades. He just does not.”
But Mercer also made it clear Johnnie Hudson has flourished on his own merits.
“None of this is because his father is an assistant coach,” Mercer said. “This kid busts his (butt). He’s earned everything he’s gotten.
“His dad’s harder on him than he is on anybody else, without question. He doesn’t get a free pass for anything.”
John Hudson agreed with Mercer.
“I’ll be the first one to tell him to take his (butt) out of the game,” John Hudson said. “But coach allows him to blossom. He has free rein because he is one of the kids who’s always going to try to make the right play. It’s a lot of trust in him.”
In Johnnie Hudson’s two seasons, he has earned the trust of standout senior point guard Eric Allen.
“He’s very nice on the court,” Allen said. “He knows how to get a bucket without anybody telling him. We put shots up before the game to get the night started. He’s just a good teammate to have.”
Johnnie Hudson also is one of the team captains this season.
“He’s becoming more of a leader now,” Mercer said. “At first, he didn’t know how to lead because he never really played basketball before. I’m asking him to step up and be one of the captains, and he didn’t really know how to go about it. But he’s getting the hang of that as far as the positive leadership and how to talk to the kids.
“He’s just a very good kid. It’s refreshing to see it.”
