Horner Joins the Club

March 3, 2005

• Listen to the Hawkeyes online!
• Watch Steve’s visit with the media live!
• Purchase your game tickets online
• Listen to the Hawkeyes on XM Radio

Seven games into the 2004-05 season, Jeff Horner led the Iowa basketball team in points, steals, 3-pointers, and he owned the best shooting percentage of any starting guard on the squad.

He was also leading the Big Ten Conference in steals, in 3-pointers made, and was fifth in scoring, a mark bolstered by a career-high 27 points against then-No. 13 Texas.

Not a bad start.

Fast-forward from the month of December, past a challenging January, and to February, and you have what is shaping up to be a very strong finish for Iowa’s floor general.

Horner scored a team-high 25 points last night in Iowa’s 74-72 victory over Ohio State, a total that included the game-winner with just under four seconds left to play. In helping to lead the Hawkeyes to their 18th win of the year, Horner also became only the 36th player in Iowa basketball history to scored 1,000 points in a career. He is the only member of that elite list to also have 400 career rebounds and 400 career assists.

Horner has also scored in double figures in nine straight games, leads the team with 155 assists and 43 steals, continues to blister it from behind the arc, knocking down three-pointers at a rate of 47 percent and has grabbed 124 rebounds, tops among Iowa’s backcourt corps.

And, by the way, he’s done all this despite being the guy getting the least amount of rest – the junior from Mason City is logging more than 36 minutes of playing time each time the Hawkeyes take the playing floor.

In short, Horner appears to be readying himself and the Hawkeyes for a finish to the 2004-05 season that will match the team’s start.

“He’s playing with the savvy of a point guard you really want, and I think he’s maturing into an outstanding guard and that’s very good to see,” Iowa Head Coach Steve Alford said of Horner in December. “I’m obviously very excited that he’s only a junior.

“Jeff is solidifying himself as one of the special guards around the country,” Alford continued. “People are starting to recognize that and as we win, attention will continue to build. He’s just running the team the way you want a point guard to run a team.”

But how did Horner, an unassuming and genuinely nice guy, get to his current position?

More importantly, how does he handle the stresses and pressures of major college basketball?

On Horner’s seemingly short – in duration – trip to the top, the first stop is at age four when his father, Bob, moved his family from small-town Lake Mills to Mason City – more than seven-times larger. That was also the year Bob Horner took the reigns of the Mason City High School basketball team and all but sealed Jeff’s fate.

“When I was two or three, I lived in Lake Mills and my dad was the basketball coach there, and I was in the gym with those guys trying to shoot, and then we moved to Mason City, and that’s when I really started to play,” Horner said.

Always a guard, the young Horner started to play in the Mason City Hawks traveling youth basketball team, which he continued until high school. And always one of the tallest kids on the team, Horner was bumped up from his fourth grade team to a fifth grade team, which was “pretty cool” he says.

At about the same time Horner realized that he wanted to be a Hawkeye, and so he attended a camp hosted by Coach Tom Davis while in sixth grade.

“I played pretty good I guess,” Horner says. “I came home from his camp and Coach Davis sent me a handwritten letter saying I did a great job and it was a great week of camp.

“Seeing that I wanted to play at Iowa and they were sending me letters already, from then on I really knew I wanted to play here.”

The letter would be the first of hundreds Horner received, but he verbally committed to Iowa as a ninth grader, just three years after the first one he got.

In high school, Horner led a team that was among the lowest in the Central Iowa Metro League to two state tournament appearances and a 38-7 record over his last two seasons. He was named team MVP all four years.

Horner’s freshman year at Mason City is another stop on his road to success.

“I came in and I kind of knew right from there that I had to be a leader on the team,” he says. “We had guys, who were seniors and way above us in grade, and it was tough but I fought through that and kind of made my way up. And I think when I was a freshman in high school, I wasn’t a captain or anything, but in my eyes I knew I had to lead that team, and that’s when things started to turn.”

Now, Horner is one of three captains on the team he’s wanted to lead since he was three.

“It’s big,” he says of being selected captain. “They’ve got to be the leader. They’ve got to be vocal. They have to do things off the court that guys see that they should do, and I think I’m a good example of that.”

Horner is also a model of grace under pressure. The point guard has learned to deal with the national media and the expectations of fans.

“Back in high school there was still a lot of press but that was basically from one newspaper, now you’re getting it from a lot of places,” he says. “You just handle it, and I’m going to be as humble as I can be. That’s just the way I am and the way I was brought up. All the attention is great but it doesn’t mean anything unless our team succeeds.”

Horner is also a public figure you could call a role model.

“You’re in a high profile game, and people are going to be watching your every move and you’ve just got to watch where you’re going – the way you act,” he says.” Because people are going to be watching you, and you don’t want to do something that will change their thoughts about you.”