Lior Berman didn’t want one of those classic heartwarming videos of a walk-on being moved onto a full scholarship. That’s not the type of person the reserved Auburn graduate guard is.

For multiple years at Auburn, head coach Bruce Pearl told Berman he would have put him on scholarship. But with Auburn having lost a spot due to an NCAA penalty, there wasn’t room. He was treated as a scholarship player with a role off the bench in the latter years of his undergraduate career, but unable to get the financial backing Pearl knew Berman had earned.

Until, finally, after his senior season ended, Pearl called Berman into his office. The conversation was quick, and it was simple. At last, there was a place for him. Quitely this offseason, Auburn moved Berman from a walk-on to a full scholarship player.

There was no fanfare. But he came back to Auburn one more time.

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The Berman family didn’t think their meeting with Pearl would last for more than 15 minutes. It was around the final weeks of Berman’s high school senior year and he hadn’t decided where he was going to college yet.

Berman had been a member of a three-time Alabama state champion Mountain Brook team, playing alongside five-star recruit Trendon Watford. Berman had offers to play at Division II and Division III schools. At that level, he was assured he’d get to play.

Berman has goals of playing professionally, but getting a good education while being a college player was still important to him. While there were schools where he could have played more minutes, he may not have gotten the same level of rigor in his classes. So he visited Auburn — but with little idea of what to expect.

It’s why Berman’s father Elan didn’t think the meeting with Auburn coaches would last long. He was just going to be a walk-on, after all.

The meeting lasted more than two hours.

Berman and his parents were impressed. Elan Berman said Pearl joked that Berman may be on a so-called “parents scholarship” to pay for college, but more seriously stated he’d have to chance to earn an actual scholarship. By the end of the meeting, Pearl offered Berman a spot as a preferred walk-on.

He accepted it in the car on the drive back up U.S. Highway 280 to Birmingham.

Coming to Auburn as a walk-on meant Berman never quite knew when his opportunity would come. It might be weeks or months before the hours he spent in practice paid off with any form of playing time in a game.

“It’s hard, but it’s also easy and what I mean by that is it’s easy to stay motivated when you have that mindset,” Berman said. “You want to be ready and it just pushes you each day to just get up and think how can I get better today to help the team win? It’s also hard because you might not see results for a long time and you don’t know when you’ll see the results.”

Berman slowly saw small increases in playing time during his four years as an undergraduate. By his junior and senior year, Berman averaged at least eight minutes per game.

He balanced his work in practice with a focus on school, where he studied industrial design.

“He didn’t have time to date girls or do a lot of the partying that college students do,” Berman’s mother Jennifer said. “He was just school and basketball.”

In this era of easy movement in the transfer portal, it would have been simple to go elsewhere. But Berman himself, both his parents and Pearl all said he genuinely loves Auburn and wanted to stay here even in an extremely limited role on the team. His degree program kept him at Auburn, too.

Yet while Berman said there were hard nights where he just felt stuck, he never questioned if all the time spent for such little total result was worth it.

What made it worth it was playing two March Madness games in 2023 in Birmingham, just a few minutes away from home and in an arena he’d played while in high school. What made it worth is how much better of a player Berman feels he is now compared to four years ago. What made it worth it is the bond he built with Pearl, as a Jewish player playing under a Jewish coach, to be able to talk about far more than just basketball.

But after his ‘One Shining Moment’ during the first-round March Madness game against Iowa in Birmingham and a loss to No. 1 seed Houston 48 hours later, the now-nicknamed “Bermanator” had to figure out what he wanted to do with his final year of eligibility.

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Berman had one more year to play because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Pearl said he didn’t have to convince Berman to come back to Auburn.

“This was a no-brainer,” Pearl said.

Pearl said he wanted to put Berman on scholarship years ago. He couldn’t, however, because the NCAA took a scholarship spot away for two years as a penalty stemming from a 2017 FBI investigation that determined former Auburn assistant coach Chuck Person accepted over $91,000 in bribes.

Now with a scholarship back available, Pearl quickly offered it to Berman in the spring.

“I wasn’t ready to leave Auburn,” Berman said.

Berman wants to play basketball professionally. He considered leaving Auburn outright after his senior year and trying to play professionally, but he wanted to stay. He believes he may have stayed regardless of the scholarship.

“It mattered to him,” Pearl said. “Because it sent a message.”

His dream is to play in the NBA, but with family in Israel, and connections already built there, Pearl and Berman have both mentioned the Israeli league as a possible fit.

And putting Berman on scholarship may be important to him playing after college.

“Let’s say professional teams in Israel, I mean there’s a big difference between ‘I walked on at Auburn,’ versus, ‘I was on scholarship at Auburn,’” Pearl said. “I think part of my doing it was he deserved it. He probably could have done it for three years had I not had the penalty. And it does help him in the future. But I didn’t do it to get him to stay. He wanted to stay.”

Berman isn’t pursuing a graduate degree, at least not yet. He’s taking a lighter courseload this fall — just enough to be enrolled as an Auburn student — so instead of focusing heavily on school and basketball as he did the last four years, he wants to just focus on basketball. He said he’s taking a few personal finance classes. He’s also taking golf.

“That’s pretty useful,” Berman said. “That’s where the deals go down.”

Still a self-proclaimed terrible golfer, Berman said he can at least hold the club properly now.

Being put on a scholarship was validation for all the years of work, Jennifer Berman said.

Thinking about her son, and getting to this point, she teared up. She’s watched him practice and chase basketball since high school. He wasn’t the star on his high school team. He’s never been the star at Auburn. Even on a scholarship this year, Berman isn’t necessarily a top option off the bench.

But Berman doesn’t want to be the star anyway. He’s still the player that comes into the gym quietly and goes right to work shooting 3-pointers.

Before being called into Pearl’s office to be put on a scholarship, Berman said he was satisfied with his college career already because of the effort he feels he’s given. So the Berman playing in his fifth year is the same Berman Auburn’s always gotten.

“It’s about time,” Elan Berman said. “But it doesn’t really change anything.”

Matt Cohen covers Auburn sports for AL.com. You can follow him on X at @Matt_Cohen_ or email him at [email protected]