Illinois's Jalen Coleman-Lands puts up a shot during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against Indiana, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2017, in Bloomington, Ind. Indiana defeated Illinois 96-80. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) (Photo: Darron Cummings, AP)

BLOOMINGTON — He's just not missing. Illinois sophomore Jalen Coleman-Lands is running the Assembly Hall baseline and catching the ball in the corner and turning and shooting and 22 feet later the net barely moves.

Illinois isn't going to win this game, the Illini aren't going to beat Indiana the way Indiana is scoring, but Coleman-Lands is burying shot after shot and this is why he was such a serious candidate at Cathedral to win IndyStar Mr. Basketball. He never did — he transferred to non-IHSAA La Lumiere for his final two years — but this game Saturday at Bloomington is why he was a Top-40 recruit and why Indiana and Purdue and Notre Dame and Michigan State offered him scholarships a few years ago, and why he'll be on the NBA radar a few years from now.

And when the game ends, I need to know more about this 6-4, 185-pounder from Indianapolis, one of the best pure shooters in the Big Ten. His mom is sitting behind the Illinois bench. Dionne Coleman Lands is wearing a replica of her son's No. 5 jersey. She sees me coming. She's smiling.

Your son, I tell her. He's a fascinating basketball player.

"He's a lot more than a basketball player," Jalen Coleman-Lands' mom tells me. "That's the first thing he'd want you to know."

OK, now I really need to know more.

* * *

Always with the phone calls. That's how Piankhi Lands has to hear about his son's behavior. Another day, and the phone rings, and this time it's …

La Lumiere basketball coach Shane Heirman, wanting Jalen Coleman-Lands' father to know how his son is spending lunch. You're not going to believe this, Heirman is saying, but Jalen isn't eating with his teammates or friends. He's finding kids at the northwest Indiana boarding school who are alone, and he's sitting down to eat with them.

A year later, the phone rings, and this time it's …

Illinois assistant coach Jamall Walker, calling to ask Piankhi Lands a question:

"Do you know your son is mentoring five or six freshmen on the football team?"

No, Piankhi tells him. He did not. But he can't say he's surprised, because this is how Piankhi and his wife, Dionne, raised their children: Be aware of your surroundings. There's always a way to impact someone else's life. Find it.

"There's stuff that's bigger than basketball, stuff bigger than getting good grades," is how Piankhi explains the Lands family way. "Like, who are you? Where did you come from? Who can you help out?"

No, Jalen wasn't playing video games or surfing the internet when he was growing up at home. He was playing board games with his family or watching documentaries. Shows about slavery, about the Holocaust, about obstacles encountered and, in the best of times, overcome.

So many shows.

"All the time," Jalen was telling me, smiling.

"I'm talking all the time," Piankhi says. "I'm like, 'Hey, I want you to watch this documentary.' They really didn't have a choice. You want to eat tonight, you want to play basketball? You're going to watch this documentary."

This is how Piankhi was raised, too. His father is John Lands, the former Fall Creek YMCA director and before that a 1970s community activist who rallied unsuccessfully to save Lockefield Gardens public housing — and rallied successfully to protect Crispus Attucks High School when the opening and ongoing sprawl of IUPUI threatened the historic and formerly all-black high school's long-term viability.

So anyway. Jalen Coleman-Lands. He was raised to look outside himself. You're more than a basketball player, Piankhi and Dionne told their son.

Even as he was becoming one of the best basketball players in the country.

* * *

Buy Photo FILE — Cathedral's Jalen Coleman cuts down a piece of the net after Cathedral defeated Tech to win the City Championship, Jan. 21, 2013. (Photo: Joe Vitti / IndyStar)

Everybody wanted Jalen Coleman-Lands. He was a sophomore at Cathedral when Kansas and Duke started sizing him