The path to a successful collegiate basketball career was anything but certain for Joey Davenport.
Yes, the Sebree native had started every game for Webster County High School since he was in eighth grade and made the second-team Associated Press All-State boys’ basketball team as a senior in 1992. But no offers to play Division I ball had come his way.
“I wasn’t 6-5 with incredible ability,” Davenport has said.
He was “a hundred-and-nothing (pound) kid,” in the words of Brad Schneider, who was sports editor of The Gleaner at the time.
In the summer of 1992, Davenport was playing in basketball entrepreneur Eddie Ford’s AAU program. His plan was to play a year for Southeastern Illinois, a junior college, with the hope that Murray State University would make good on its pledge to take him as a sophomore.
Then by chance, John Brady, the head coach at Samford University outside Birmingham, Alabama, bumped into Ford in Louisville at an AAU tournament, where coaches often hunted for prospects.
“I’m looking for a point guard,” Brady told Ford.
Ford pointed at Davenport. “There he is,” he said.
After driving to Dixon to watch Davenport shoot at his high school gym, Brady offered him a spot on his team. Davenport and his family prayed on the matter—he had never heard of Samford before meeting the coach—and he ultimately accepted, signing with the school the day before classes began. Aside from the coach, he didn’t know a soul there.
“I went from playing at Webster County, knowing everybody, to knowing no one,” he said.
But four years later, it’s a safe bet that just about everybody at Samford knew Joey Davenport, who has just been named to the 2025 class of the Samford Athletics Hall of Fame.
As a 6-foot-1 guard for the men’s basketball team from 1992 to 1996, Davenport put his name in the Samford record book and helped turn the Bulldogs into a winning team.
“He went on to transform Samford basketball and make it one of the hottest tickets in Birmingham during his time on the team,” Brady recalled in a 2015 “Where Are They Now?” article about Davenport for Samford men’s basketball.
It wasn’t a sure thing from the start.
“When Joey rolled in as a 17-year-old, he looked like he was 12,” the coach recalled, “but he was a special athlete and could really shoot the ball,” Brady said.
Grit, determination and desire were vital factors in his success.
“I worked really hard to be a good basketball player,” Davenport said in 2023. “I’d go to the gym at 5:30 in the morning.” He might not be the best athlete, he said. But nobody was going to outwork him.
Hard work paid off. Coming off the bench as a freshman, Davenport averaged a very respectable 10 points per game. That helped earn him a regular spot in the starting lineup as a sophomore in 1993-94, scoring 447 points and averaging 19.4 points per game to lead his team in scoring.
Playing against No. 13-ranked Saint Louis that season, Davenport scored 35 points—accounting for more than half of his team’s total points—as Samford lost by just two points.
During the 1994-95 season, he led his team in assists, dishing out 86 for the season while also scoring an average of 17.6 points per game.
As a senior, he helped lead his team to the Trans America Athletic Conference (TAAC) West Division Championship while averaging 17.4 points.
Averaging in double-figure scoring all four years is “what I’m probably most proud of,” he said.
Davenport today ranks as the fourth all-time leading scorer in program history with 1,651 points. He scored more than 400 points in three consecutive seasons, and averaged 16 points per game for his career.
He is Samford’s all-time leader in career free throws made (557) and is second in career free throws attempted (679), while shooting 82% from the line.
In the 2015 article, Davenport was described as a “shifty guard with a silky-smooth shooting stroke” who was a “feisty defender and reliable ball-handler.”
“As a basketball player, he might have been the last player picked for a pick-up game, but he was also the player you wanted taking the last shot in every game,” Mike Morris, who served as an assistant coach during Davenport’s junior and senior seasons, was quoted as saying.
“He was extremely tough as a player and had a great ability to beat his defender, drive the lane and get to the free-throw line,” said Brady, Samford’s head coach from 1991-97.
“Along with being one of the best three-point shooters I’ve ever had” — Davenport ranks 57th in career three-point shooting percentage in NCAA history — “what also stands out to me was how he had the ability to constantly get to the line and shoot close to 90-percent during his last three seasons,” the coach said.
“Joey meant so much for Samford University and transformed the program from a place that was drawing 200 to 300 fans a game to one that was packing Seibert Hall and averaging close to 3,000,” Brady said. “Before his arrival, Samford suffered six-consecutive losing seasons and he helped build that situation into the program that eventually went to back-to-back NCAA tournaments.”
After graduating, Davenport spent a year as an assistant coach at Samford, then returned to Kentucky and became a financial advisor in Henderson with Hilliard Lyons, which is now Baird. He holds the position of director.
He and his wife, Amy have two children: Cooper, 18, who set the Henderson County High record for career three-pointers as a junior last season and is hoping to play college ball, perhaps at Samford, and Addison, 15, who is a competitive dancer with Thrive Dance Studio in Evansville.
Davenport said it’s gratifying to be selected for the Samford Athletics Hall of Fame, into which he will be formally inducted next April. It’s a reward for “the hard work and dedication of all those countless hours that no one sees.”
“More important than anything,” he said he’s grateful for “the coaches and players and my family, what they invested in me. Samford did far more for me than I did for Samford.”
The private Christian university “kept me in Christ,” he said. “We had to go to church. It was a great school to stay spiritually connected, and the education is second to none. It’s one of the reasons I have been successful in business.”
Davenport, who has traveled as a motivational speaker, speaks to audiences about the importance of relationships.
“Relationships do matter,” he said, such as the one he developed with Eddie Ford, first in Webster County, then while traveling to AAU tournaments stretching from Las Vegas to Paris, France. That relationship led to Ford recommending Davenport to a Samford coach who was in need of a point guard more than three decades ago.
“It totally changed the trajectory of my life,” Davenport said.
Meanwhile, the hall of fame induction isn’t the only way his name will be remembered at Samford.
“They’re building a new state-of-the-art practice facility,” he said. The practice court there is going to be named the Joey Davenport Family Court—appropriate for someone who spent so many hours in practice, honing his skills.
