Today we’d like to introduce you to Trevor Huffman.
Hi Trevor, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I grew up in Petoskey, Northern Michigan, and basketball was always what I cared about most. I ended up playing college ball at Kent State, and by the time I left, I’d become the program’s all-time leading scorer — I was a two-time MAC Tournament MVP, an NCAA Mid-Major All-American, and we made it to the Elite Eight in 2002. That run is still one of the sport highlights of my life.
From there, I played professionally for 13 years, mostly overseas. I had short stints with the Phoenix Suns and New York Knicks, but the bulk of my career was in Europe — Belgium, France, and beyond. I won league and cup championships and a few MVP awards along the way in Portugal, Belgium, and France, and later got into coaching too — I coached Okapi Aalstar in Belgium in 2019.
Even while I was still playing, I started training young players back home in Northern Michigan — I founded Huffman Basketball and ran that for over a decade. When my playing career wound down, I wanted to bring everything I’d learned — as a player, as a coach, as someone who’d been through the grind overseas — back to Northern Michigan. That’s how Huffman Basketball came together. I built it with other former pro and college players, including Wills Lee, a passionate college player and trainer, because I wanted kids here to have access to the kind of high-level training and mentorship I had.
Since then, I’ve also gotten into a few other ventures — I co-founded Swish House, a basketball fitness startup for adults. I also write on Substack about the mental side of sport, change, mental health, fitness, grief, personal development, and entrepreneurship. I think the life lessons sports taught me matter just as much as the physical training.
But Huffman Basketball and writing have always been at the core of my life after pro hoops: helping the next generation develop their game and, honestly, helping humans figure out who they are when they have to let go of what they did.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Honestly, no — it’s been anything but smooth.
It started early. Coming out of high school in Petoskey, Michigan, I wasn’t the guy anybody was fighting over. I was undersized, overlooked, and had to fight just to get a real shot at a Division I offer. That chip on my shoulder followed me through my whole career, honestly — I always felt like I had something to prove.
Once I got to Kent State, the results came, but the road there wasn’t easy either — building a program up to the point where we could make that Elite Eight run in 2002 took years of grinding through seasons that didn’t go our way first.
Turning pro was its own kind of struggle. I never got a real foothold in the NBA — I had a couple of looks, but nothing that stuck — so I spent 13 years bouncing around overseas leagues in Germany, Poland, Belgium, Venezuela, France, and more. That life sounds glamorous from the outside, but it’s a grind: constantly proving yourself on new teams, dealing with language barriers, contracts that could end abruptly, injuries you had to play through because your livelihood depended on it, and long stretches away from home and the people you love. There were plenty of years I didn’t know where I’d be playing the next season.
And then there’s the transition after playing — that’s a struggle almost nobody talks about. When your identity has been “basketball player” for your whole life, figuring out who you are without it is genuinely hard. I went through real periods of fear, anxiety, and self-doubt trying to figure out my next chapter, and I’ve been pretty open about that in my writing since — the perfectionism and guilt I carried as an athlete didn’t just disappear when I stopped playing; I had to actually work through them.
Building Huffman Basketball and the other writing ventures like my Trevor Huffman Substack have come out of that struggle to evolve as much as anything — trying to turn everything I fought through into something useful for the next generation of players, so they don’t have to feel as lost as I sometimes did.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
These days, I mostly write on my Trevor Huffman Substack.
Or my work centers on Huffman Basketball, the youth-to-high-school training program I built here with Wills Lee in Northern Michigan. What we do, at its core, is skill development, camps, and training— we work with players of every level, from kids just picking up the game to elite travel team athletes and college-bound recruits, using a methodology I’ve built over 20-plus years of playing and coaching at a high level myself.
I focus mostly on writing, improving my pickleball game, training others too (I’m around a 4.5 – 5.0 level), and staying healthy so I can make the most of the rest of my life as I get older.
In my past, I’m probably best known up North for my Petoskey soccer and basketball Final Fours, State Championships, and personal records. At Kent State, I’m the all-time leading scorer and led our team to the Elite Eight in 2002. In Europe, I spent 13 years playing professionally overseas—winning championships and MVP awards in a few different countries. Right now, if you got ahold of me, I would probably prefer to work with you on the pickleball court rather than get jump shots.
But honestly, what I’m most proud of isn’t any of that. It’s what I’ve built since — my consistency in keeping my writing alive, Huffman Basketball, and watching kids I’ve trained go on to play at the college level, get named as Mr./Miss Basketball candidates, sign with college programs, and become the kind of competitors who chase things down the way I used to.
What sets me apart, I think, is my vulnerability in sharing my story about all the things I’ve experienced in pro sports and what has happened to me beyond the locker room. I write about what it actually takes to bounce back from failure, change, loss, grief, and setbacks. Everyone needs this kind of story, because I’ve been the underdog at every single stage.
I also bring a range of life experiences to what I create and do, so athletes and readers aren’t just getting my perspective—they’re getting the full picture of the top 1% of athletes and what it takes to come out happier and healthier on the other side.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
Right now, books and resources I’m using/reading:
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
David Perrell Podcast, How I Write
Masterclass.com
Pricing:
- $35-50 HB Training session
- $8 Trevor Huffman Substack Membership
- $50-75 Pickleball Training
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hbelitetraining.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thuffman24
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorhuffman24/
