Dream Ladder

It may seem that Cory Schlesinger ’09 is living the dream, but he longs for 50 acres and some chickens.

For now, he is leaning into his position as executive director of Basketball Performance for the Detroit Pistons. He’s a long, long way from Hillsville, Va., a one-stoplight town amid the Blue Ridge Mountains.

He grew up there with his mom, Kandy Schlesinger, a U.S. Air Force veteran turned product designer, molding clay figurines to send to Kurt S. Adler, Inc. to be approved for mass production.

“My mom was a starving artist who got lucky and had a couple of projects that struck really well. She designed figurines you see at Christmastime.”

Her biggest claim to fame might be the 1991 “Holiday Pockets” leaflet from Leisure Arts that inspired a generation of do-it-yourself Christmas sweaters.

While his mom made Christmas, Schlesinger was trying to figure out how to live up to his brother’s athletic accomplishments. Warren Schlesinger landed scholarships to Emory & Henry College to play football and baseball.

“My brother was my only male role model,” Schlesinger said. “He pushed me to find something I was better at than him. That’s how I found basketball.”

Schlesinger’s success at point guard led to an unexpected offer to play for Berea College. “College was not a part of my plan in any stretch of the imagination,” Schlesinger said, “and going to Kentucky definitely wasn’t on the Bingo card. At least, I didn’t think so, but here we are.”

He didn’t know what to expect but felt he fit in immediately on a small campus that seemed an extension of high school. His class was bigger than his graduating class of 50, but not so large that the young man weathered the kinds of stressors that come with large universities.

“I don’t think I would have done well in a larger state school, mainly because of the distractions,” he said. “The cool part about Berea is that it is intimate. Within half a year, you’re going to know the whole campus.”

That whole campus pretty much couldn’t go anywhere back then. “The policy was you had to live more than eight hours away to have a vehicle,” Schlesinger said. “No one had a vehicle, so you and your peers had to make fun out of nothing.”

When Schlesinger wasn’t at basketball practice or inventing new fun with friends, he was a sports medicine major whose campus job was vacuuming in the Special Collections and Archives at Hutchins Library. The next year, he transitioned to working as an athletic trainer, overseeing sports practices. Eventually, he was able to create his own personal trainer position.

Sandy Williams, associate professor of Health and Human Performance, put him on a career path that is still in motion.

“Sandy was crucial throughout my time at Berea,” Schlesinger remembered. “Working as an athletic trainer got me working with team sports outside of basketball.”

Soon, Schlesinger took on paid internships at Wake Forest University, where he worked with the men’s basketball and football teams, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he worked with national title winners.

“By the time I was 21 years old, I’d already worked with two Division I teams,” he said. “I got to develop as an athlete because I got to practice with those guys, to play pickup games. I could walk into [UNC Men’s Basketball Coach] Roy Williams’ office, practice with elite players and develop professional connections. It was unbelievable.”

After getting the chance to shoot over seven-footer Tyler Zeller, Schlesinger graduated and aimed for graduate school. While pursuing a master’s degree in Exercise Physiology at Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C., he took a graduate assistant position. Schlesinger was now responsible for the health and performance of six Division I athletic programs, including soccer, volleyball and tennis.

Two years later, at age 23, Schlesinger climbed the next rung by accepting the position of director of Strength and Conditioning at Santa Clara University in California. He was by far the youngest director of a Division I program.

“So you got this kid out of a one-stoplight town, who has never been to a big city, managing personnel and balancing the budgets of 13 Division I teams in the Bay Area, one of the most expensive zip codes in the world.”

Though it would be intimidating for just about any recent graduate not yet old enough to rent a car, Schlesinger said he was ready because of the head start he got at Berea.

“I got so much experience early that taking that job wasn’t overwhelming,” he related. “It was just another rung on the ladder and the best possible position for me to be in.”

The next rungs on the ladder included stints at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Stanford University. In 2019, the former point guard was finally drafted to the NBA—as the head strength and conditioning coach and director of performance for the Phoenix Suns.

They were the worst team in the league. In 2020, though, Schlesinger helped players like Devon Booker, Deandre Ayton and Frank Kaminsky go 8-0 in the NBA COVID bubble. In 2021, the Suns went to the finals.

And now, he gets to do that for the Pistons. The biggest difference between the NBA rung of the ladder and lower ones, he said, is that “the eyes are much, much more upon you.”

“I have, unfortunately, a large social media following,” he wryly added, before explaining that these days he is also touring the world to speak on human performance topics. Providing educational content online has led Schlesinger to speaking engagements in China, Brazil and, this year, London.

They say success begets success, and these successes are leading to other ventures. Recently, Schlesinger founded NOT DONE YET Performance with his wife, Dr. Shirine Gharib, a sports medicine chiropractor.

“None of this was planned,” he said. “It happened because I stayed curious and took advantage of what Berea offered. Berea allowed me to be curious. It gave the space to explore what was possible. Opportunities are there only if you’re curious.”

At just 38 years old, Schlesinger is, as the all-caps proclamation in his company name suggests, not done yet. There is still much for the point guard from Hillsville to accomplish, perhaps more rungs on the ladder. But the ultimate goal is to reconnect to where it all began. Somewhere is a patch of land where Schlesinger, his wife and their daughter, Mila, can exist outside the heat of the limelight. The dream ladder is perhaps circular.

“I want chickens,” he said, “and cows. The dream now is how do you get to 50 acres, to where you can raise your family the way you want to? Growing up, I wanted to get as far away from Hillsville as possible and see the world. But now I want to get back to that. That’s the dream.”