Ezequias James Walker doesn’t hear his full name that much anymore. The Lloyd Memorial High School junior never hears it unless his mom is getting on him about something, which is rare.
“I might hear Ezequias every now and then when we have a substitute teacher at school,” he said. “Other than that, not very much.”
That’s because everybody knows him as E.J. Walker, Lloyd Memorial’s heavily recruited 6-foot-8, 235-pound basketball player. With 27 college offers, he’s especially familiar to basketball coaches. Among those wanting in on the wondrous Walker are Wisconsin, West Virginia, Ohio State, Minnesota, Purdue, Xavier, Dayton, Arizona State and California. All of them, and more, have offered him a scholarship to play basketball.
He received his first college offer from Youngstown State just before the start of eighth grade. It caused him to give up his other lifelong sporting love, football, where he played tight end and defensive end in middle school. The latest basketball offer came from South Carolina.
When he isn’t studying to improve his 3.98 weighted grade-point average at Lloyd while taking history and math classes at Northern Kentucky University, and when he’s not averaging a double-double with averages of 17.6 points and 10.3 rebounds per game on the basketball court, Walker is making unofficial college visits. He traveled to the University of Tennessee on Saturday. He’d like to whittle the list of interested schools by the end of winter. He hopes to choose a college destination by the beginning of summer.
No matter what he does. No matter where he goes, Walker is going to have his high school basketball coach with him every step of the way. The coach will be with Walker on the sideline, in the locker room and at school. The coach will be with him at home. The two will be together when they eat, when they relax, and when they travel like they did Saturday when they shared a three-hour car ride to Knoxville to visit the Volunteers. In fact, they will be together almost all the time.
That’s because Walker’s coach is also his father, Michael Walker, now in his fourth season as Lloyd’s head basketball coach.
They are quite the duo for the Juggernauts.
Last season, E.J. Walker was a Northern Kentucky Athletic Conference Division II all-star. In the run-up to this season, he was ranked the second-best basketball player in the area by NKAC coaches. In his class of 2025, he is Kentucky’s second-ranked college prospect, according to Prephoops.com. A statewide panel of coaches ranked him sixth on this year’s list of Kentucky’s top 30 high school basketball players in a poll conducted by the Louisville Courier-Journal.
He scored his 1,000th career point Jan. 9 at home with seven seconds to play in a win over Simon Kenton as the Juggernauts put together a 13-5 record with just one loss against 9th Region competition. They are ranked third in the region in the latest statewide media poll. At various points this season, he has been state-ranked by the KHSAA in rebounds per game and field goal shooting percentage.
Michael Walker was a basketball standout himself at Yellow Springs High School near Dayton, Ohio. He eventually became a basketball coach and had a stop at Cincinnati State before coming to Lloyd. He teaches in the special education department at Tichenor Middle School which shares a campus with Lloyd Memorial.
“I’d be curious to know what he thinks are the pros and cons of having his father as a coach,” the elder Walker said.
The coach’s son said it’s all good.
“It’s amazing and I’m grateful,” said the younger Walker. “He’s a great coach and a great dad. To have that is special. Some guys don’t have a father figure. I have a friend who lost his dad. But my dad has always been there. Both he and my mom have made sacrifices for me, and I’m blessed.”
There are some challenges, but nothing to worry about.
“My dad and I are so close it’s easy for me to talk to him,” said the player. “As my coach, I’m not talking back to him. But instead of listening all the time, I explain things back to him now after he’s talked to me, so he’s knows why I’m doing what I’m doing. And sometimes that can be difficult. But I know he’ll point me in the right direction.”
The Walkers, a family of six including four children, live in Florence. But they don’t have a basketball hoop any more.
“I retired from playing him one on one two years ago because I’m undefeated,” said the coach, who is 6-foot-3. He called his high school self an “aggressive scorer” capable of putting in 20 points a game on the regular.
E. J. Walker gets up at 6 a.m. some mornings to work out at Griffin Elite Sports & Wellness in Erlanger with Tyler Bezold, former Northern Kentucky University head basketball coach Dave Bezold’s son. Then Walker goes to school, after which he might shoot around to keep his shots sharp. Then he has either a practice or a game, or he heads to Newport where he works out at Nevels Fitness run by former local prep football standout Jordan Nevels.
Walker’s bedtime is normally around 10:30 or 11 p.m., but a few times he’s been so wiped out from his heavy schedule that he’s crashed hard at 7 p.m., even with a newborn in the household.
Coach Walker gets up in the morning and teaches school and doesn’t touch a basketball until he rolls them out for Juggernauts practice later in the day when his son picks one of them up and starts shooting.
“I think he got better than me this past summer,” the coach said. “But he still hasn’t beat me.”
The younger Walker has heard that one before.
“That’s what he says, but I did beat him once when he was at Cincinnati State and I was a lot younger. The rules were I could only score with my left hand, and he was kind of letting me score so I could get used to using it,” said the right-handed forward. “But that still counts because I scored the most.”
Not too long after that, the younger Walker had a growth spurt that resulted in him reaching his dad’s height. His mom will never forget the day she noticed son was finally taller than dad when they crossed paths in the kitchen.
“I happened to look at them when they were standing next to the refrigerator. Then I put them back-to-back,” Brittany Walker said. “I looked at my husband and said, ‘He’s got you.’ He was saying, ‘No, no,’ so I took a picture of them standing together and showed it to him. E.J. was taller.”
He kept growing. So did 6-foot-1 sister Peyton Walker, a Conner senior volleyball player heading to Eckert College.
“In high school, he has to guard bigger guys. But at the next level he’ll probably play forward,” coach Walker said. “He’s so versatile he can guard anybody. In our first game against Sycamore, he went up against a 7-footer (Raleigh Burgess) going to Purdue and had 13 points and seven rebounds after they both got in foul trouble early. He’s gone up against guards and forwards while playing AAU. Waler is playing for Midwest Basketball Club in Cincinnati on the 3-Stripe Addidas circuit (3SSB) so he’s going up against some of the best players in the country.”
A big change has come lately resulting in a 17-pound weight gain, almost all of it muscle.
“He can absorb and finish through contact a lot better now,” coach Walker said. “He’s more explosive. There isn’t anything he can’t do. He can score and he can rebound. He can really pass it and he makes teammates better.”
Plus, he’s an efficient shooter, connecting on 60% of his shots from the field, 41% from 3-point range and 73% on free throws.
“He told me the other day he doesn’t take a bad shot,” coach Walker said. “I told him I need him to take some bad shots sometimes because I need him to score.”
The better they work together, the better the Juggernauts will play. After all, they have the same short-term goal: Win the 9th Region Tournament championship.
“The mood of the team is good,” the younger Walker said. “We had an eight-game winning streak. My teammates are playing well. We’re still getting better. We can definitely win the 9th.”