Lane Basketball Camps: 50 years of hoops, pranks, and legends
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Lane Basketball Camps mark 50 years of player development at Transylvania University.
- Camp alumni include NBA players, NFL draft picks and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.
- Over 63,000 campers from all 50 states and 15 countries have attended since 1976.
This summer, one of the cornerstones of Kentucky’s basketball development system has reached a historic milestone: The Lane Basketball Camps at Transylvania University are celebrating 50 years of operation.
Those camps, which have brought five decades of aspiring, school-aged hoopers to Lexington, were run for their first 26 years by Don Lane, the former Transy men’s basketball coach. They have been run for the past 24 years by Brian Lane, who succeeded his father and still serves as Transylvania head man.
To understand the integral role the Lane Camps have played in the story of basketball in Kentucky, one need only review a list of hoops luminaries for whom camping at Transy was a part of their starts.
That group includes an NBA first round draft choice (Rex Chapman), a former Kentucky Wildcats player with a jersey retired at Rupp Arena (John Pelphrey), and the fourth-leading scorer in Tennessee Volunteers men’s hoops history (Chris Lofton).
Other alumni of the Lane Basketball Camps include an NFL overall No. 1 draft pick (Tim Couch), and the incumbent governor and lieutenant governor of Kentucky (Andy Beshear and Jacqueline Coleman, respectively).
For 2025, the final sessions of the Lane Basketball Camps — the Middle School Team Camp and the Overnight/Extended Day Camp — will each wrap up Tuesday.
“After this summer, we will have had over 63,000 campers, between the two of us, over the 50 years,” Brian Lane says of he and his dad.
In the entire history of the Lane Camps, there have been attendees from all 50 states and 15 foreign countries, Don Lane says. Included in that latter number are three campers from Costa Rica who attended the “Guard and Perimeter Camp” that was running from July 8 through July 10.
Starting in the summer of 1976, after Don Lane had succeeded Lee Rose as Transylvania men’s hoops coach the previous year, he built the Lane Camps on a foundation of basketball basics.
“Always been about fundamentals, particularly in the early years,” Don Lane said. “Everybody knew this was one of the best fundamental camps around.”
To spread the word about the camp during its infancy, Lane relied on a network of high school coaches from all corners of the commonwealth. “I had coaches in each region (of the state) to help me promote it,” Don Lane said.
During his youth, Brian Lane said attending his dad’s camps was like being exposed to a “who’s who” of Kentucky high school hoops coaching icons.
State championship-winning coaches Bo Davenport (1976 state title at Edmonson County), Tom Creamer (1978 Shelby County) and Larry Miller (1981 Simon Kenton) and state runner-up coaches Ron Bevars (North Hardin 1982) and Craynor Slone (Carlisle County 1983) were among those who regularly staffed the Lane Camps.
In those early decades, before the rise of summer AAU basketball and the vast proliferation of out-of-season hoops options that players of the current era enjoy, the camps at Transylvania were a central component in how basketball players in the commonwealth were instructed.
The Lane Camps were “one of the first overnight camps I went to at a very early age,” says Travis Ford, the Madisonville product who went on to become the starting point guard on Kentucky’s 1993 Final Four team and then a long-time NCAA Division I head coach. “I think I might have been eight, nine years old. From that point on, from going there, I loved it so much, I enjoyed it so much, I went back every year.”
In his day, Ford says the appeal of the Lane Camps was definitely not derived from the creature comforts provided.
“There was no air conditioning available. I remember that vividly. I remember walking to the gyms in single file line, to all the different gyms, because there were so many campers,” Ford says. “But I thought I was in the big time because, ‘I’m in Lexington, competing against kids I didn’t know, and learning the game of basketball.’ I just thought it was the biggest thing that ever had happened to me.”
Today, facing vastly more competition for campers, Brian Lane has modernized the now air-conditioned Transy camp experience and shortened its duration. “The two team camps we do are the biggest camps now,” he says. “But I still do individual camps, as well.”
The best camp pranks
Brian Lane says his favorite memory from 50 years of camps isn’t really a recollection at all. It is a thrill he experiences anew each summer on the first day of high school team camp.
“I visualize teams all across the the state getting in their busses, loading up, and everybody coming to Lexington, everybody coming to Transy, for camp,” he said.
A half-century of camps means 50 years of camp pranks. Don Lane, 82, recalls a high school coach who came to Lexington to work the camp who seemed to be enjoying the city night life perhaps a tad more than was advisable.
So at an early-morning meeting of the camp staff, Lane had a sheriff’s deputy show up and call that coach out of the meeting “for a little talk.”
“Nobody knew (it was a prank) except for me,” Don Lane said. “It got so quiet in that room, you would have heard a pin drop. Then I busted out laughing.”
Back in the day, Brian Lane, 57, says a perennial favorite among pranksters was for a camper to fill a trash can with water, prop it up against another attendee’s dormitory door, then knock.
When the prank victim opened the door, “the water would just rush into their room,” Brian Lane says. “I probably shouldn’t bring that up. I don’t want them to start doing that one again.”
Across five decades, various incidents have driven home for Don and Brian Lane the reach of the basketball camps that bear their last name.
In the 1980s, Don Lane flew his family to California to go to Disneyland. “I got off the airplane at the airport in Los Angeles and first person I see had on a ‘Don Lane Transylvania Basketball Camp’ shirt,” he says.
Decades later, Brian Lane was flipping through a Time Magazine when a photo caught his eye. “It was a kid at a camp in North Carolina doing archery — and he had on a ‘Brian Lane Transylvania Basketball Camp’ shirt,” he said. “That was pretty cool.”
This story was originally published July 11, 2025 at 6:57 AM.
