They're Just Family

They all get a variation of the same question ... "Are you Charlie's brother?" "Are you Larry's brother?" "Are you Jimmy's brother?" It's just a question, but Just is always the answer. "It used to be, 'Are you Charlie's brother?'" Charlie Just says. "Now that they've had some success people ask, 'Are you Jimmy's brother? Are you Larry's brother?' That really makes me proud. I tease Jimmy and Larry about that all the time, now I'm their brother." But that's life when your last name is Just and you're involved in basketball in Louisville. "It's been awfully good to us," says Charlie, the eldest of the clan and the women's basketball coach at Spalding University, speaking of the sport. His younger brothers Jimmy, 44, and Larry, 42 are high school coaches at duPont Manual and Oldham County, respectively. Contrary to what you might expect, the Justs weren't raised on basketball. Their father, Jerome, was a maintenance mechanic at National Distilleries for 35 years and their mother, Shirley, was a housewife. The couple still lives in the Germantown neighborhood where they raised their six children. "They missed nothing that we did," Charlie says. Charlie got involved with sports at a young age, and as they grew, his five siblings followed his lead. "He kind of got us started," says Larry, the youngest. "Charlie was kind of the pioneer in the whole thing and got us interested in basketball and we followed suit." The younger Justs grew up watching Charlie play basketball at St. X, then later at Ohio Northern University, before he became the coach and athletic director at Mercy Academy at the age of 22. "Watching Charlie coach at Mercy is what got me interested in coaching and at that level," Jimmy says. "Watching them play at EKU during the state tournament was inspiring and something I wanted to be a part of." But each has done it in a different way. The middle three siblings, Jerry, Glenn and Denise (Gahfer), were all involved in sports, especially basketball, in one way or another, and at one time each has coached the sport. But the two youngest Justs, Jimmy and Larry, have taken it to the high school and college level. Jimmy coached girls' and boys' basketball at Iroquois before taking the boys' head coaching position at Manual, and Larry assisted Charlie at Bellarmine for eight years before becoming the head coach at Quincy and Lincoln Memorial universities. He left Lincoln Memorial to get closer to his family, taking the girls' head coaching job at Oldham County this year. "They didn't have a choice but to be interested in basketball," Charlie jokes. "That's the way it was in our family. By the time those guys came along they had no choice, they were going to be involved in basketball." And along the way this close-knit family has been there for each other when one of them was in need of an in-bounds play or to bend another coach's ear. "We try to help each other any time we can, any way we can," Jimmy says. "You don't feel like you're bothering anybody with questions." But there's one question that still persists. "We still meet plenty of people who say 'Hey, are you Charlie's brother?'" Jimmy says. "But if people are knowing my name then hopefully it's in a positive light ... It seems like we've got a lot of support here in the city." Josh Cook is a freelance writer based in the Louisville area.