How Penn State basketball’s Jalen Pickett leaned on family to reach his peak — with another year on the horizon
Roughly 90 minutes before tip-off of any given Penn State men’s basketball game, Jalen Pickett walks out of the tunnel.
The senior guard meanders his way from one end of the court to the other — at his own pace, ignoring the occasional opponent shooting as he passes by. Eventually he gets to the other end where his teammates are warming up.
Sometimes he steps right into some jumpshots.
Most of the time he yawns.
“Even as a kid, other kids would go out and do stuff and hang out,” Annon Bennett, Pickett’s older brother, told the Centre Daily Times. “Jalen would go to school, do his work, play basketball, go to practice and take naps. If he wasn’t taking a nap he was playing a video game.”
Pickett’s mid-day naps, his calm demeanor despite the chaos and his deliberate walk to his teammates are all equal pieces of who he is.
The senior guard has earned many nicknames in his basketball career — from “Uncle Pick” to “Old Man Pick” and many in between — and they all fit.
His maturity and measured approach have carried him throughout his time on the hardwood and were instilled in him by a brother who has embraced a role as his mentor.
It should be no surprise, then, that Pickett is already planning on what he’s going to do after this season. He has one more year of eligibility left after the NCAA granted all athletes competing in the 2020-2021 season an extra year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I definitely think I’m probably gonna take my fifth year,” Pickett told the CDT Tuesday afternoon. “Hopefully things go right.”
Deciding to come to — and stay at — Penn State
With another year to go, Pickett — who hails from Rochester, New York — will have one more opportunity to show what he can do at the college level and another year around his family. He spent three seasons at Siena before transferring to Penn State after Micah Shrewsberry was hired as head coach in March 2021. He spent those three years — and his first year as a Nittany Lion — with the constant support of his brother and his mother, Gwendolyn Pickett.
His decision to come to Penn State wasn’t a foregone conclusion — and didn’t necessarily happen just because his family can make the quick trip into town from New York.
Some of the best teams in the country, including the two championship game participants last season — Baylor and Gonzaga — came calling for the guard. He had options after entering the portal, but it was something he frequently goes back to that led him to Penn State — relationships.
“Everything from (associate head coach Adam Fisher) calling me every day,” Pickett told the CDT in January. “Shrews calling me every day. Fish would call me two or three times per day, then Coach Shrews would call me too, so that’s four calls just from them. ... They really made it a family environment for me. They really got to know me and that meant a lot to me.”
The added bonus for his family was that he would still be close enough to go watch — although Bennett said they’d have traveled wherever to watch his brother.
That effort Bennett and his mother put in to keep up with his younger brother began long before Pickett’s college career, especially with his brother. He’s been with him through thick and thin on the court, despite nearly a decade of experience separating the two.
Brotherly competition, support
Bennett is eight years older than Pickett and that age difference could easily have created division. Instead it helped form the bond centered around the sport both love.
“Because (Annon) played basketball, Jalen would see him playing and see him playing with his friends,” Gwendolyn told the CDT. “Sometimes people would ask me when he started playing and I would always say two (years old). He wanted to do everything Annon and his friends did.”
Their mutual love for the game led to plenty of competition. As Pickett tells it, his brother was the record-setter at Aquinas Institute in New York, before he came through to outdo him on that front.
But neither will admit to losing to the other in games of one-on-one — with both laughing at the thought of making the admission — but that competitive fire is what helped push Pickett. He followed his brother around as a child, doing whatever he did, playing whenever he did and learning just how he did.
That led to an advanced basketball knowledge for Pickett early on and it allowed him to develop his game. He’s slower. He’s methodical. He’s deliberate. Whatever you would like to call it, it isn’t fast. But it is effective. His pace and game, which features a lot of post ups and deliberation — especially for a guard — are what make him the talent he is and is something Bennett noticed early.
“I love his game,” Bennett said. “We actually play completely different. I love his game because his IQ for the game is just phenomenal. ... Once I started to not be on him about what he didn’t do, and more coach him on what he does well, that’s when (it clicked). It’s like ‘use your post game, maneuver, do your pump fake, do the herky jerky stuff.’ It’s like, however you maneuver, you do it. And it works for him. He knows himself and he knows his game.”
Growing on and off the court
The maturity and advanced development helped Pickett grow up early off the court, too. He wasn’t one to do things that would distract him, although he didn’t really take basketball as seriously as he could until he gave up football, where he excelled as a wide receiver.
Still, his maturity shined through. Gwendolyn Pickett knew she had a child advanced beyond his years from an early age, and saw the parallels between his maturity on the court and the way he acted off it.
“There definitely is (a similarity)” she said. “When it comes to something like basketball that he’s very interested in and very focused, he just has his plan, with what he’s gonna do and how he’s gonna do it. He just does it. He thinks it out very well.”
His wisdom can manifest in different ways, but mostly it’s as a calming influence. The senior guard celebrates when he can, shaping his fingers into the letter “w” (for “whoop”) after making a three — a self-admitted meaningless celebration created at Siena when playing video games with teammates.
But mostly he’s even-keeled. He rarely gets too high, and he rarely gets too low. That’s particularly valuable in a college basketball season where things can get turbulent quickly.
He leans on his calmness, much as he has all season.
“I just try to be the calm and steady presence,” Pickett said Tuesday. “Just tell everybody, ‘we’re good here, (let’s) make our move.’ Then when everybody is super excited I’m like, ‘Guys we still gotta finish the game, stay focused we’ve got a good like six or seven minutes, we’ve got to put it together for a full game.’”
Pickett’s steady presence and maturity have been important for a team that has seen it all this year. The Lions have upset Michigan State at home, lost their final home game of the year against lowly Nebraska and seen everything in between.
There was plenty to learn from those experiences — and as Pickett says it proved the team can beat or lose to anyone in the conference — and he’ll have another year to do just that.
No matter how that extra year goes, the Nittany Lions will have Pickett at the controls on offense, steady as they come, ready to take on whatever challenge comes next.
