The 50th Dixie Basketball Camp will be held at Southwest Mississippi Community College for the 42nd year starting Sunday and will run through Friday. Participants will stay in the dorms on campus for the week.
Joe Dean Sr., a guard for LSU in the 1950s, and Brad Brian, a guard for LSU in the 1960s who was a senior when Pete Maravich was a freshman, started the camp in Baton Rouge in the 1960s.
After Dale Brown became the LSU head basketball coach, Dean Sr. and Brian knew they could not compete with any camps the Tigers held and looked for a new location. Dean Sr. was friends with former SMCC President Horace Holmes and moved the camp there in 1974.
Dean Sr., who has since passed away, was the athletic director at LSU from 1987-2001. Around the time he took that position, his son, Joe Dean Jr. took over running the camp and believes SMCC is still an ideal location.
“I think the main thing is that it’s a small rural community,” he said. “The 42 years we’ve been on the campus there’s only been three presidents and all of them were from Pike County.”
Dean also said all three of those presidents have been athletes.
The camp is sold out and has 500 kids attending.
Dean estimated 70 percent of the campers are from Louisiana, while the other 30 percent come from Mississippi and Alabama. There are mainly kids in grades six through nine, but some older high school kids attend the camp. In addition to learning fundamentals and skills, there will be 5-on-5 games at night.
“Our camp is a fundamental camp for individual players that want to get better at basketball,” Dean said. “We keep them a full week. You don’t have that much anymore.”
Dean said he bought special T-Shirts celebrating the camp’s 50th anniversary.
“My dad always believed that basketball was just a vehicle to teach kids life lessons in any walk of life,” he said. “We talk about that and motivation. We talk about how they can use the athletic arena to learn life lessons.”
Dean said the camp teaches teamwork, dedication and fighting through adversity.
“It’s a very special camp,” he said. “Everybody that’s ever been there knows it’s very unique. It has a real special spirit and enthusiasm. The kids are fired up every day and have a positive attitude. We preach those qualities every day. The bottom line is it’s more than just a basketball camp. It’s a motivational camp. We use basketball to teach kids these lessons we want them to learn.”
Although the Deans worked together to keep the camp running for 50 years, their basketball careers took very different paths.
Following Joe Dean Sr.’s career at LSU, he played professional basketball in the industrial league for the Phillips 66 Oilers from Bartlesville, Okla.
His son was a point guard for Mississippi State and an assistant coach at the University of Kentucky under Joe B. Hall from 1977-87. He was the head coach at Birmingham Southern from 1983-89 and the University of Central Florida from 1989-1993, then went into private business for a few years and came back to Birmingham Southern where he has been the athletic director for the past 16 years.
Joe Dean Jr.’s late mother, Doris, also went to LSU, like Joe Dean Sr. However, Joe Dean Jr. said that did not stop his parents from supporting him in college.
“Anytime Mississippi State played LSU, it was obviously very emotional for a lot of reasons,” Dean Jr. said. “My parents were LSU graduates, but they wanted their son to do well. It was a lot of fun.”
The history the father and son team brought to the table has helped the camp grow through the years,
“We’ve kind of maintained our heritage the last 50 years,” Dean said. “When kids and parents are deciding on where they’re going to spend the summer and where they can get a good week of fundamentals, there aren’t a lot of camps out there. Our camp has a reputation for being one of the best.”
