Remembering NIC-10 basketball record-holder, who died at age 43

When Steve Goers closes his eyes, he can still see Joe Tulley. But he’s not pulling up for a jumper. He is running in the streets.

“He would run with the basketball beneath his arm in our neighborhood, going from his house to a nearby court to play. Not just once,” said Goers, a longtime Boylan coach whose 881 wins rank third in state history, “basically all summer when we weren’t playing.

“He epitomized what Boylan basketball was all about. He was extremely hard working. He didn’t need motivation. He had self-motivation.”

Tulley died Sept. 18, three weeks before his 44th birthday. He was living in Henderson, Nevada, with his wife, Rachel, and twin 13-year-old daughters, Susan and Brooklyn. He owned and operated a packaging distribution company.

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But in Rockford, he will always be remembered as one of the greatest players in Boylan’s grand history. Tulley was a three-time first-team all-conference pick for teams that went 88-10 from 1997-99. He is the second-leading scorer in Titans history with 1,724 points, trailing only Lee Lampley (2,419). He averaged 24.2 points as a senior, including a 54-point game against East that remains the NIC-10 record.

“He was so fun to watch, such a good shooter,” his uncle, Mike Tulley said. “He was good from anywhere.”

Any conversation about the greatest shooters in NIC-10 history start with Lampley, Hononegah’s Ryan Hoover, who went on to play at Notre Dame and then played in various pro leagues for 16 years, East’s Sincere Parker, who made over 100 3-pointers as a junior and had back-to-back 30-point games in college last year at St. Louis, and Joe Tulley II.

“That’s pretty accurate,” said East coach Roy Sackmaster, who coached Parker and played with Tulley for two years at Boylan. “As an absolute pure shooter, Joe was right there in the conversation with anybody.”

“To this day,” said Pecatonica coach Bobby Heisler, an all-conference player from Harlem who graduated the same year as Tulley in 1999 and also played with him in some “legendary summer pick-up games” at Rock Valley College. “Joe had the best mid-range jump shot I’ve seen in the area. It’s a skill that’s lost in today’s game.”

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It was a skill he never really got to show in college. Tulley averaged 5.4 points, 1.8 rebounds and 1.2 assists in four years at DePaul. He looked like he was about to break out after his sophomore year. That was a dreadful year for DePaul, which began the season ranked No. 21 in the nation but fell apart and finished 4-12 in Conference USA. Tulley might have been the biggest bright spot as the season ended, averaging 12.7 points his final 15 games after averaging only 2.9 the first half of the season. Twice during that stretch he made six 3-pointers in a game, one shy of the school record at the time.

That encouraged coach Pat Kennedy to recast Tulley as a 3-point specialist. He opened his junior season shooting 2-for-14 back in Rockford at the MetroCentre in a preseason NIT win over Fordham. He was OK as a 3-point shooter (shooting .344 for his career) but the role never really fit him and DePaul got even worse, going 9-19 (2-14) and getting Kennedy fired.

“Joe could have been a phenomenal college player, but was completely underutilized,” Jeff Myers, Tulley’s back-court mate at Boylan who went on to start three years at Richmond, told the Register Star in a story four years ago about Rockford’s greatest basketball games. “The 3 was a component of his game, but it was not the only component of his game.”

Tulley scored 567 points in high school on 3-pointers. He scored two-thirds of his points from inside the 3-point arc.

“Joe was really good at moving without the ball to get open and reading screens and cutting across the defender’s face,” Sackmaster said. “He would hit that little floater or pull-up shot. He could score from all angles. He wasn’t one of those guys who lived and died by the 3. He had a really good all-around game and could score in a variety of ways. That’s what made him so hard to guard.”

But when his friends remember Joe Tulley playing basketball, they don’t think about what could have been. They think about what was. And how Joe Tulley made it happen. They think of Joe Tulley running through the streets, eager to play basketball. To work at basketball. To improve his already great game.

“I can’t remember any of my teammates, throughout all the sports I played at all the different levels, who poured as much work into their sport as much as Joe did,” said Sackmaster, who was also a star quarterback in his Boylan days. “His work ethic was just relentless. Just an unbelievable competitor.”

Matt Trowbridge is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at mtrowbridge@rrstar.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, at @MattTrowbridge.

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Former Boylan All-State basketball player Joe Tulley dies at age 43