Train for the next level. Be ready when you get there.

Level Up is the player-development program Coach Darnell Campbell founded in Santa Barbara. One system, Core → Craft → Code, from a coach who has done one-on-one skill work with NBA players, directed the Clippers’ youth program, and spent eleven years on a Santa Barbara school campus coaching kids.

DM @dchoops to train (opens an Instagram message in a new tab) How it works

Hall of Fame, 2006–07 Lake Erie Storm
Skill work with Cavaliers, Jazz and Clippers players
Head coach, Laguna Blanca varsity

Coach Darnell Campbell bent over a whiteboard in front of a bench of seated young players — A timeout, drawn up

Why most training stalls

Getting better isn’t the hard part. Being ready when the next level shows up is.

The next level has a date on it: the school tryout, the first club season, the camp with college coaches on the baseline. Any kid with a ball and a driveway gets better before then. Ready is different. Ready is footwork under the handle. A jumper that still goes in when a hand goes up. And the part most training never touches: how a player talks to a teammate after a turnover, how they hear a coach, what they do in a huddle when the ball isn’t theirs.

That’s three different things. Most programs name one of them.

Level Up names all three, and trains them in the same program.

Coach Darnell bent over a blue clipboard in the middle of a group of young players, several kneeling to see it — The huddle, not the highlight

The system

Core. Craft. Code.

Core

Fundamentals

The base everything else sits on, and the first thing to go when it was never built.

Footwork and balance
The handle, both hands
Shooting form and the pass
Defending with your feet

Craft

Position-specific skill

Guards learn to read a ball screen. Bigs learn the post and the glass. Wings learn to move without the ball and get to the rim. Programs are built per player, after an evaluation of where the game actually is, not where the age group says it should be.

Pick and roll, reading the floor
Post moves and rebounding
Moving without the ball
Attacking the rim

Code

The character to lead

Mindset, leadership and communication are coached in every session, not saved for a talk at the end. Coach Darnell is a Student Wellness Specialist as well as a coach, and the gym is where he teaches both.

Mindset: the play after the turnover
How you talk to a teammate
How you hear a coach
The huddle when the ball isn’t yours

Before the drills start, Laguna Blanca

Why there is a Code

The coach who saw more in him than he saw in himself.

Darnell’s AAU coach, Bryce Seymour, was a father figure at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Seymour’s passing is the hardest thing basketball ever handed him, and Seymour pushing him toward more than he thought he had is the thing he says shaped his development most.

Every coach he played for after that won a coach-of-the-year award, by his count: Ken Vana in Ohio his junior year of high school, Cliff Hunt in the league his first two college seasons. Code is him doing for players what those men did for him.

The whole story, on the About page

A system is only as good as the person running it. His record.

Coach Darnell Campbell

From the Cavaliers’ camps to a Santa Barbara campus. Same coach, same system.

About twenty years of gyms, era by era.

2006–07
Lake Erie College, Ohio. The Storm go 25–3, a program record, win a second straight AMCC championship and reach the NCAA tournament. Darnell is All-AMCC Second Team and finishes fifth all-time at the school in both points and rebounds. Semi-pro ball after, and overseas offers he turned down to coach kids in the States.
2005–12
Starts coaching with the National Basketball Academy in Cleveland. Shane Kline-Ruminski, who ran it, taught him how to teach a skill and how to run a camp.
Cleveland
About twenty years of Cleveland Cavaliers youth camps and clinics, and skill work with the team’s players.
Los Angeles
Director of the LA Clippers’ youth basketball program, building the development pathway for the next group of players.
NBA players
Al Jefferson was the first NBA player he worked with, and showed him what pro-level training looks like and what giving back looks like: free youth camps in Jefferson’s hometown. More than ten years of one-on-one player development since, including Kyrie Irving, Kyle Korver and Jaime Jaquez Jr., and skill work with players from the Cavaliers, Jazz and Clippers.
Santa Barbara
Eleven years at The Riviera Ridge School, overseeing athletics and student wellness. Founder of Level Up, now close to a decade old. Co-founder and head coach of Pro/spects, and Director of Basketball for the Central Coast Soldiers, the Nike EYBL program’s new Santa Barbara team.
2025
Inducted into the Lake Erie College Athletics Hall of Fame with the 2006–07 team, September 13. Named head varsity boys basketball coach at Laguna Blanca School in October.

About Coach Darnell

A system that only works in its author’s home gym isn’t a system. So here it is, six thousand miles from Santa Barbara.

The system travels

Same drills. South of France.

The Level Up drills went to Bandol, on the French coast, for the TMB Level Up Camp. New gym, new language, same drills. The camp awards are in the photos.

0 mibetween the two gyms. Same drills.