01
Core
Fundamentals
Seven years of National Basketball Academy camps and about twenty of Cavaliers clinics: camp after camp of kids taught footwork, the handle, the shot and the pass from the ground up.
About Coach Darnell Campbell
Twenty years of gyms. One way of coaching.
Darnell Campbell is a basketball coach and player-development trainer in Santa Barbara, California. He founded Level Up, co-founded and coaches Pro/spects, directs the Central Coast Soldiers, the Nike EYBL program’s Santa Barbara team, and in October 2025 was named head varsity boys basketball coach at Laguna Blanca School. Before any of that: eleven years on a Santa Barbara campus, The Riviera Ridge School, overseeing athletics and student wellness.
- Hall of Fame, 2006–07 Lake Erie Storm
- Skill work with Cavaliers, Jazz and Clippers players
- 33 reviews on CoachUp
Why the person comes first
He coaches the person because that is what was done for him.
Darnell’s AAU coach, Bryce Seymour, was more than a coach: a father figure at fifteen, sixteen and seventeen, the years that decide whether a kid keeps going. Seymour saw more in him than he saw in himself. Seymour’s passing is the hardest thing basketball ever handed Darnell, and the push Seymour gave him is the reason character has a name in his program. He calls it Code.
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 his college league, his first two seasons. Shane Kline-Ruminski at the National Basketball Academy, from 2005 to 2012, showed him how to teach a skill and how to run a camp. And Al Jefferson, the first NBA player he worked with, showed him what pro-level training looks like and what giving back looks like: free youth camps in Jefferson’s hometown.
That’s the coaching he got. Here’s where he took it.
The record
Player, then trainer, then coach. The record, era by era.
Lake Erie College, the Cavaliers, the Clippers, the NBA floor, Santa Barbara.
- 2006–07
Lake Erie College, Painesville, Ohio, NCAA Division II. The Storm go 25–3, a program record for wins, win a second straight AMCC championship, and become the second team in school history to reach an NCAA national tournament and the first to earn a first-round bye. Darnell is All-AMCC Second Team and finishes fifth all-time at the school in both points and rebounds. He plays semi-pro ball in the ABA and UBA afterwards, and turns down overseas offers to coach kids in the States.
- 2005–12
Starts coaching with the National Basketball Academy in Cleveland under Shane Kline-Ruminski. Seven years of learning to teach a skill and 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 youth basketball for the LA Clippers, building the development pathway for the next group of players.
- NBA players
More than ten years of one-on-one player development: Kyrie Irving, Kyle Korver, Al Jefferson and Jaime Jaquez Jr., and skill work with players from the Cavaliers, Jazz and Clippers.
- Santa Barbara
Eleven years as a full-time faculty member and coach 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. Director of Basketball for the Central Coast Soldiers, the new Santa Barbara team of the Oakland Soldiers’ Nike EYBL program.
- 2025
September 13: inducted into the Lake Erie College Athletics Hall of Fame with the 2006–07 team. October: named head varsity boys basketball coach at Laguna Blanca School. In the words of Laguna Blanca’s athletic director, Dan Peeters, a hire made to “revitalize the program.”
Every era on that list is a gym full of kids. What they got from him is the same three things.
What the record is for
Core is the camps. Craft is the NBA floor. Code is Bryce Seymour.
02
Craft
Position-specific skill
Ten-plus years of one-on-one work with NBA guards, wings and bigs. The same per-player approach, evaluation first, now built for a kid in Santa Barbara.
03
Code
The character to lead
A Student Wellness Specialist by title and a coach by trade. Mindset, leadership and communication are coached in the gym, in every session, the way Seymour coached him.
Three parts, one coach. Here’s where he runs them now.
Where he coaches now
Four programs, one Santa Barbara.
Level Up
His player-development program: individual sessions, camps and clinics. What it offers.
Laguna Blanca School
Head varsity boys basketball coach, from October 2025.
Pro/spects
Co-founder and head coach. Local and regional circuits, outside AAU. prospectsbasketball.org (opens in a new tab).
Central Coast Soldiers
Director of Basketball. The Oakland Soldiers’ Santa Barbara team on the Nike EYBL platform.
33 reviews on CoachUp (opens in a new tab)reviews on CoachUp
“Coach Darnell is the best coach my son has ever had.”Parent review, CoachUp
“Darnell is respectful and encouraging.”Review, CoachUp
Four programs, and the same first step into any of them. One message.
Start here
Train with Coach Darnell.
The fastest way to reach Coach Darnell is a DM. Pick what fits below and the message writes itself; copy it, open the DM, send. He takes it from there.
@dchoops (opens the Instagram profile in a new tab)
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