"It had to be Duke."
So said Duke's 4th head coach, Joanne P. McCallie, when asked in a
teleconference if there was any other school she would have left for after
signing a 5-year extension at Michigan State. Throughout the course of the
press conference and subsequent teleconference, "Coach P" expounded upon just
why this was, going back to visiting the Duke campus for a recruiting trip in
the early 80's, her experience as a scholar-athlete at Northwestern, and her
vision of what Duke could be as early as 1990. It's clear that in McCallie,
Duke has landed someone who is delighted beyond belief to be here and wishes to
bring the program to even greater heights.
Let's review how Coach P got to be Duke's head coach 25 years after
visiting it as a high school senior. She was recruited by then-assistant
coach Jacki Silar (now the associate AD) for Debbie Leonard's program.
That would have put her in the class of '87 at Duke, along with former
shot-blocking queen Sarah Sullivan and guards Kim Hunter & Carolyn
Sonzogni. Duke was starting to put somewhat respectable showings at that
point, finishing with a winning record for only the second time in school
history when then she visited. The obvious question: why Northwestern
instead of Duke? Joanne noted that while she visited Duke alone, she
visited Northwestern with her mother, and that wound up being a crucial
deciding factor.
 What's interesting is that if she had attended Duke, she would have
played two seasons with Joanne Boyle, a 1985 graduate of Duke and
an assistant on last year's 19-and-under Olympic team whom Coach P refers
to as a dear friend. She would have played three years with Chris
Moreland, Duke's greatest player until the arrival of Alana Beard.
Oddly, her career at Northwestern in some ways mirrored what might have
happened at Duke, because she played two seasons with the great Anucha
Brown. Like Moreland, she was Northwestern's first 2000-point scorer,
first conference player of the year and a record-holder in a variety of
categories. Then known as Joanne Palombo, she was a complementary player
throughout much of her career at Northwestern, though she did earn a Big
10 honorable mention as a senior. Perhaps more important than that was
the fact that she was Northwestern's first representative on the Academic
All-Big Ten team in 1987. Despite never leading her team in assists in
any season, she's still in the top 10 in career assists at her school.
Very much like Boyle, her status as a complementary player was crucial in
understanding how a team must function as a unit in order to succeed.
After her playing days, she switched conferences and became an
assistant with Joe Ciampi's Auburn program. Coach P noted that
Ciampi had been a friend of Coach K's since his days at Army. Both of
their programs started to grab national attention at around the same time,
and Coach P's arrival in 1988 demonstrated a career-long knack at
displaying a keen sense of timing. During her first two seasons as an
assistant, Auburn made it to the NCAA finals both times. Led by all-time
SEC greats (and future pros) like Vickie Orr, Ruth Bolton, Carolyn Jones,
Linda Godby and Lauretta Freeman, the Tigers had a blend of inside-outside
dominance. Their achievement was obscured somewhat by the fact that they
lost all 3 title games, including a heartbreaking 2 point loss to
Louisiana Tech in 1988. In 1991, the Tigers made it as far as the Elite
Eight. She did sign a top-5 class after that season in her role as lead
recruiter for the program.
After the 1992 season, Coach P decided it was time to return to her
native Maine and her first coaching job with the Black Bears. Playing in the
low-major North Atlantic Conference meant that you had to win your tourney to
get a sniff of the postseason. Coach P made that happen when she recruited
Cindy Blodgett to Orono. Blodgett scored over 3000 points in her career and
helped lead the team to 4 straight NCAA tournaments and earned a few seasons in
the WNBA. Blodgett led the nation in scoring twice, but just as important was
her earning Academic All-American status as a senior. Even after Blodgett
graduated, the Black Bears still went to the NCAA tournament under Coach P in
her last two seasons. Considering the pressure her teams must have felt in
their conference tournament, making the tourney six years in a row is an
impressive feat.
In 1995, the Black Bears were a 16 seed and got stomped by UConn. In 1996,
their 27-4 record got them an 11 seed, but they were matched up against
Virginia in Charlottesville and lost badly. Maine lost to LSU in the first
round in another true road game as a 13 seed, but this time the game was much
more competitive. In 1998, Maine was once again a 13 seed, but were no match
for NC State in Blodgett's last game. Interestingly, her team became even
tougher without Blodgett the next season and earned a 10 seed. That squad
upset Stanford in the first round for Coach P's first-ever NCAA victory.
Interestingly, they next lost to Old Dominion on their home court, a team that
would be Duke's third-round matchup in their march to the 1999 title game. Her
last team earned a 12 seed and narrowly lost to UNC and Nikki Teasley in 2000.
After nine seasons and a good bit of success, McCallie was now ready for a
major-conference challenge: rebuilding Michigan State. A program with
considerable resources and a history of success in many sports, the Spartans
had had some success in the late 90's, taking UNC to overtime in the NCAA
tournament before falling in 1997. There's a difference between building a
team and building a program, and the Spartans weren't able to sustain their
NCAA success, though though they did get WNIT bids in 1999 and 2000. Coach P's
first season in Sparty-land in 2001 wasn't a memorable one, but she quickly got
her team back to the WNIT the next season, making it all the way to the
semifinals.
Coach P quickly managed to assemble a team of overachievers both on the floor
and in the classroom. She had a remarkable 14 different players on the
Academic All-Big Ten team and an Academic All-America in Liz Shimek. She went
to 5 straight NCAA tournaments with just a single high school All-America
(Tiffany Shives)--and she transferred after a single season. Coach P built her
program for the Big Ten: gritty, rough-and-tumble and disciplined.
Her teams never had much speed and quickness, but she compensated by
playing a deliberate style on offense and a sticky matchup zone on defense
that helped neutralize opponents with physical & athletic frontcourts as
well as guards who could attack off the dribble.
She built her program around point guard Kristin Haynie, shooter
Lindsay Bowen (left), forward Liz Shimek (right), and post bruiser Kelli Roehrig.
Haynie & Shimek were both 1st Team All-Big Ten during their careers. The
team dipped their toes in the NCAA waters in 2003 and 2004, making it to
the second round in the latter year before losing to...Texas.
2005 was
the season where everything came together for the program, even with only
7 players getting regular playing time. The team won 33 games and beat
Notre Dame, UConn, Ohio State, Minnesota, Purdue and Penn State. They
also won the program's first-
ever Big Ten tournament title. In the NCAA
tournament, they faced a murderous lineup of teams and knocked off
Vanderbilt, #1 Stanford and #3 Tennessee to go all the way to the finals.
Against the Lady Vols, the Spartans rallied from a double-digit deficit to
win the game. MSU ran out of gas against Baylor in the title game, but
that didn't diminish the team's accomplishments.
MSU's subsequent seasons were solid. Shimek & Bowen returned in 2006 and the
Spartans were blasted by Duke in the third round of the NCAA tournament. I
asked her about that game, and in particular if she ever imagined she'd be
where she was today after getting handled by the Blue Devils. There's a slight
bit of ruefulness that came across her face whenever a particular loss was
mentioned, as there is for any successful coach--there's always the wish that
they somehow could have done something better in order to win. Still, given
her status as Duke's coach now, Coach P could only note that she had beaten
every one of college basketball's giants during her career: Stanford,
Tennessee, UConn--everyone but Duke. "I've never beaten Duke, so I might as
well join them."
Speaking of season-ending losses, McCallie was coy when initially asked if she
intended to keep Duke's match-up with Texas in Austin in the 2007-08 season.
When I asked her if she had thoughts on that game, she replied that she does
indeed have thoughts on it, but that she'd prefer to focus on the matchup with
Rutgers in Cameron next year instead. When pressed about it later in the
teleconference, it seemed pretty clear that she was uncomfortable with the
notion of that game, even if the players seemed pretty determined to play it.
She did say, "you don't play these kinds of games", and I took that to mean that
the emotion that would be involved on both sides would be such that it could be
counterproductive to playing good basketball. There's a difference between
wanting a revenge game against a team that has beaten you and a revenge game
against a coach who has hurt your feelings, so it will be interesting to see if
the players feel the same way about wanting that game in the future, and if they
can convince Coach P to keep it on the schedule. Of course, another reason why
she wanted to talk more about Rutgers than Texas was that they beat her
Michigan State team on their own homecourt, and she felt like her team didn't
play as well as they could have.
What's interesting about her desire to coach for Duke is that she
wanted the job as early as 1990. This was after Moreland had left, during
a period when Debbie Leonard was really struggling. After her Auburn team
lost to Stanford, the leading model for academic & athletic excellence, it
was clear that McCallie thought that this model could be replicated
elsewhere. Duke seemed to be an obvious choice both because of its
academic prestige and the fact that basketball was king on its campus.
Coach P referred several times to her experience as a student-athlete at
Northwestern and how she thinks the balance is so important to develop
young women fully. So despite the fact that her coaching career has been
exclusively at large state institutions, she always wanted the opportunity
to recruit and coach the best scholars and athletes in the country. Gail
Goestenkors laid the foundation at Duke, proving that high school
All-Americans would be willing to come here and thrive in Duke's
environment, and it's up to Coach P to continue in that tradition.
An area that Coach G greatly improved was attendance--but the Devils
still struggled to get big crowds, game after game. McCallie boosted
MSU's attendance into the top ten nationwide and drew huge crowds for
their NCAA regional games. One of McCallie's goals is to be able to
string together several ("10 straight") sellouts. At this point, she
doesn't have a particular plan on how to accomplish this, though she did
note that she had a huge ballgirl program at MSU, having as many as 400 at
a time. I asked if she planned to hire a promotions director, and she
noted that this was a possibility but that she wasn't sure what the best
course of action would be.
 Speaking of personnel, Coach P will be
bringing
her entire coaching staff with her from Michigan State. She didn't want
to comment officially on them because contracts need to be negotiated and
signed, but this is certainly her plan. As for the rest of the staff, she
noted that it would be a blend of Duke & Michigan State people. It will
almost certainly include Kate Senger as her director of basketball
operations, replacing Melissa Anderson. At MSU, Senger handled community
outreach, travel, promotions, fundraising, scheduling, and boosting
attendance. Needless to say, she'll need to hit the ground running in
order to determine Duke's needs in all of these areas. Gale Valley and
Shannon Perry will join Coach G at Texas.
It's likely that the rest of Duke's
basketball support office, Bobby Sorrell, Shaeeta Williams
and Lauren Rice, will either stay or be asked to stay. If this
indeed becomes
the case, it'll be a nice bit of continuity for the players and
fans--especially with alums like Sha and Lauren around. Speaking of jobs,
McCallie's husband John, an economics professor at MSU, will be taking a
year off to help the family get settled and will seek employment in the
area after that.
McCallie's coaching staff will likely consist of Al Brown, AnnMarie
Gilbert and Samantha Williams. Brown's had an interesting career; he was
a men's basketball coach for 26 years prior to joining Pat Summitt's staff
in 1995. Noted as an outstanding post coach, he was a big part of the Lady
Vols winning 3 straight titles. He'll have a lot of talented post players
to work with at Duke. Gilbert worked with the guards and was the primary
recruiter as well. Interestingly, she spent eight years as the head coach
of Div III Oberlin before she joined McCallie at MSU. She also spent a
year as an assistant on the men's basketball team before she took over as
head coach of the women's team, a rarity in basketball. Williams was
announced as the team's latest hire just a week before McCallie took the
Duke job. McCallie recruited Williams to Auburn in the early 90's and had
been the lead assistant at DePaul. DePaul ran an uptempo, high-octane
system and so she should be a great fit for Duke. She'll work with the
team's guards and will be an important figure for incoming frosh Jasmine
Thomas in particular.
The press conference itself was quite a production, and shows how far
the program has come. When Gail was hired back in 1992, the announcement
did not exactly draw a lot of press. For Coach P, there was a huge media
section on Cameron's floor, a number of seats for fans, and a huge
presence by print, TV and internet media. Coach P's enthusiasm was such
that she simply couldn't stop grinning from ear to ear. She noted that
when Joanne Boyle turned Duke down and the job became "clearly open", she
wanted the job and that Duke "didn't have to ask too many questions."
She spoke of how impressed she was the players, and in fact noted that she
had never been so impressed with any group of women in her life. She
noted their connection, their spirit and their sense of humor (most
importantly, to her). She also spoke of how thrilled she was to meet
Coach K and hoped that he wouldn't mind a "pesky little sister" asking his
advice and input. She looked forward to learning from him and hoped that
he could learn from her as well, if she had something to teach.
On Thursday, what was supposed to be a quick meeting with Coach P and
the players grew into a nearly two-hour session of discovery. There
wasn't much discussed about x's and o's, but rather trying to figure each
other out. While Coach P frequently talks about the importance of family,
she noted that you "can't force a relationship"--it has to happen
naturally. Joy Cheek noted that Coach P began the session talking about
her family and encouraged others to talk about their families as well.
All of the players spoke of Coach P's enormous enthusiasm and were happy
and relieved that the process was over. Chante Black was especially happy
because she knew there was a chance that the coaching search could have
been a protracted one. Instead, a coach was chosen while they were all
still on campus and before they went their separate ways for the
summer.
Of course, the players have been amazing throughout the whole process.
Abby Waner was the most visible member of the team as both a
spokeswoman
and advocate for her fellow teammates with Duke's administration, but all
of the upperclassmen played a role in keeping the team united. Everyone
understood how fragile the team and the program has been in the past
month, but Emily Waner noted that they had to "pull together or fall
apart". The attitude that the team was trying to take was not just
adapting to change, but embracing it. This process will obviously take
time as Coach P figures out the best ways to relate to the players, both
on and off the court.
Emily also noted that as a player, she was used to change. She
transferred to Duke from Colorado, sat out a year, and had to adjust to a
new offense, new school and new way of doing things. She hopes that she
can help the other players with that adjustment, given her
experiences.
Rising sophomore forward Joy
Cheek was certainly
all smiles, and was happy to hear that Al Brown was an outstanding post
coach. Joy also noted that her shoulder should be healed by July and she
should be able to resume major conditioning again after that. At the
moment, she's mostly restricted to using an exercise bike. She doesn't
anticipate any major problems with her rehab, given that she had injured
the other shoulder in high school.
Speaking of rehab, Chante Black is playing pickup ball a few times a
week against both men and women, wearing a knee brace while she does so
just in case.
Chante practiced against Ali late in the season in
order to
give her someone tall to work against, but she wasn't in good enough game
shape to really play at a high level. Even though her knee felt fine, she
knew that she was in a position where she could have easily sustained
another kind of injury if she pushed it too far, too fast. She noted with
some regret that she'll have to spend the summer working on her shooting
again and was disappointed that she wasn't able to show off her improved
perimeter touch last season, nor was she able to really continue to
practice the same kinds of shooting drills when she was injured. Still,
she anticipates getting that shooting touch back as she works out this
summer and wants the opportunity to be a team leader and even a captain
next season. Black is also looking forward to having a team that will be
even quicker next season than in '07 and hopes that Duke will continue to
be a press-and-run squad.
On the subject of what system Duke would run, Coach P noted that she
changed styles when she went to the Big Ten from Maine, and will change &
evolve given the challenge of the ACC and the very different kind of
players Duke has; she stated "I have changed before and I will change
again". She used the matchup zone and a halfcourt offense because she was
limited in the kind of players she could get and specific roster problems
that she faced. Given a roster with little depth, lateral quickness or
leaping ability, it was necessary for her to use a system that hid her
team's flaws and maximized her strengths. It's quite clear that at Duke,
she's going to throw out most of what they did at both ends of the floor.
It was obvious that she was licking her chops at the chance to coach
run-and-jump athletes for the first time, and I think everyone was
relieved to hear that she wouldn't try to fit a square peg into a round
hole. At the same time, Duke's players were quite comfortable in playing
many different kinds of offenses and defenses, using zones in certain
situations and executing quite efficiently in a halfcourt offense last
season. The greatest hallmark of Duke's players has always been their
versatility, and it will be interesting to see if Coach P continues to
exploit this aspect of the team. It'll also be interesting to see how she
adjusts as a coach playing against UNC's combination of power & speed as
well as Maryland's lethal array of scorers.
Coach P noted that she called Krystal Thomas and talked to her, and was assured
that she's still coming to Duke next year. Class of 2008 commitment Shay Selby
called her to let her know that she was still intent on coming to Duke and Coach
P was certainly delighted to hear that. Jasmine Thomas and Karima Christmas
were also contacted, though Coach P hadn't had a chance to talk to them yet.
Another interesting factor to watch in upcoming years is how Coach P recruits.
At MSU, she recruited almost exclusively on a regional basis, which is certainly
appropriate for a state school. At Duke, she'll obviously need to make a huge
adjustment and will need to become familiar with a very different set of
networks and contacts, both at the high school and AAU levels. To a degree,
she agreed that Duke sells itself, but understands that one can't be complacent
on the recruiting trail.
This will certainly be a busy summer for McCallie, as she has to move,
hit the recruiting trail and coach the USA Under-20 team. She won a gold
medal last summer with a team that included Essence Carson & Kia Vaughn of
Rutgers, Erlana Larkins of UNC and Victoria Lucas-Perry of Michigan State.
Those games will take place in June & July.
Interestingly, McCallie has a number of connections to UNC.
Her husband is a UNC grad, though she stated emphatically that her children
will burn any UNC regalia they might have. McCallie also noted that there
will be no question of loyalty for her husband: he will root for Duke.
She did note that Dean Smith had been very nice to them in recent years.
He met her after she lost the 2005 title game and Smith was eager to talk
to her husband as well. She did wonder out loud what Smith thought of her
taking the job at Duke.
Overall, the notes sounded on this day emphasized relief that the
process was over, excitement over a new opportunity, a feeling of everyone
pulling together for a common goal, and above all else, a desire for
letting the healing begin. McCallie is sensitive to the fact that this
team has felt wounded and abandoned, and will take a while to get to know.
At the same time, the team can sense her enthusiasm and desire to maintain
Duke's degree of success. The experience has drawn the team closer than
ever: the concept of "I" was completely obliterated during this journey as
they realized they had to rely on trust each other completely. The way
that the current players kept the incoming recruits in the loop and
treated them as though they were already on the same team with them was
remarkable. As Emily noted, this group could have very easily fragmented
a month ago. Instead, they found new ways to grow stronger. Hopefully
they can continue to grow as players and individuals with their new
leader.
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