Coachable Carter wears well at Round Lake

Family talks, both serious and light-hearted, happen every night at Juddon Carter’s house in Round Lake.

He and his mother Edna might wind up talking about shoes, and teasing each other about who has more.

“I think she still has more than me, but not by much,” Carter said with a laugh. “I probably have at least 35 pairs of shoes. I love shoes. I love to match them to what I wear. One of my favorite things to do is shop for shoes.”

Carter, Round Lake’s sharp-dressed and even sharper-shooting 6-foot-2 senior guard, finds plenty to talk about with his dad Reggie, too. They can go on and on about sports and fitness. Reggie is a track and football coach at North Chicago High School.

“He’s always giving me advice about working out, stuff like that,” Carter said. “He’s a teacher so we talk a lot about college and schoolwork, too.

“Both of my parents are really, really nice people and we talk all the time. They are always so supportive of me. I have a good relationship with both of them.”

Carter knows he’s lucky.

He says that many of his friends don’t have two parents raising them, let alone guiding them step-by-step. He says that his life, and in turn his basketball career, would have probably been much different if his home life wasn’t as solid as it is.

“Things would be way different, especially if I didn’t have a dad around,” Carter said. “Without a dad, it’s huge. I have some friends who don’t have dads and that impacts them.

“I think it’s easier (for boys) to get off track without (dads). My dad is always talking to me about doing the right thing and keeping a good spirit because you never know who’s watching you. My dad keeps me on the path I need to be on.”

In terms of basketball, that path has been the fast track.

Carter, a starter at Round Lake since his freshman year, is gearing up for his fourth and final varsity season, and is widely considered one of the top returning players in Lake County.

He and the rest of the Panthers, along with boys basketball teams all over the state, will tip off the 2011-12 season next week. When the season wraps up in March, Carter, who averaged 17 points last season en route to eventually hitting the 1,000-career point mark, will likely stand as the all-time leading scorer in Round Lake history.

He is less than 300 points away from breaking that 38-year-old record of 1,335 points. If Carter simply hits as many three-pointers as he did last year alone, he’ll come close to surpassing the record. He rolled up a mind-blowing 80 of those in 26 games.

“When Juddon is done, if he has the kind of senior year we hope he has, you’d be hard-pressed to find a kid from here with a better career,” said second-year Round Lake coach Jim Roberts, who was just getting to know Juddon when he dropped a career-high 37 points on Johnsburg last year in a Christmas tournament game.

“You hear a lot of stories about a lot of good players from here in the past, but they never really made it all the way through. Something happened, or they stopped playing.

“Juddon is going to make it because he’s such a great kid. As a coaching staff, we’re always talking about how lucky we are to have a kid like Juddon. He works hard, he’s so coachable. Whenever I tell him something, it’s ‘Yes, coach.’ I can’t tell you how huge that is. I think a lot of that comes from his parents and the way they’ve raised Juddon.”

Carter was raised with love … and to love sports.

He used to tag along over to North Chicago for his dad’s practices on the track. Most times, he’d wind up in the gym.

“When I was younger, I would go into the gym and I would stay there and shoot until I couldn’t shoot anymore,” Carter reminisced with a smile. “My dad would sometimes come in and feed me the ball, or sometimes he’d put me on the shooting machine.

“But most of the time, I was just in there by myself, shooting and shooting. I remember just thinking about the future, that I could actually go somewhere and do something if I kept working hard.”

Carter hasn’t slowed down in high school. In fact, he’s probably working harder than ever.

He played on three AAU teams this past summer and spent dozens of hours in the gym and in the weight room. One of his favorite past times is simply taking a ball outside and working on his dribbling in the driveway.

“Juddon is known as a great shooter, and he is that,” Roberts said. “But I think the biggest thing Juddon brings to our team is his constant worth ethic. He is always going hard in practice. He busts his butt in the weight room. He doesn’t miss anything and you never have to get on him to compete or give his best effort.

“Coaches are always saying they need their best player to be their hardest worker and we have that in Juddon. He’s the most dedicated player on our team. He’s the most coachable player on our team. There’s no better example for the other kids on our team than Juddon.”

Being a role model is easy for Carter. After all, he is simply teaching what he’s already been taught at home.

pbabcock@dailyherald.com