DUKE BASKETBAL
The Duke basketball manager charged with carrying Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s clipboard during games has these words planted in his brain, because he must always be in the exact same spot relative to the team’s esteemed leader during timeouts and other stoppages in play. He must be just behind the Hall of Fame coach and slightly to his left so that if Krzyzewski wants the clipboard to draw up a play, he can obtain it with a minimum of thought and a maximum of efficiency.
“You always have to make sure the board and marker are ready — uncapped, in the right direction, holding the board out exactly,” Zack Spiera, a senior and this season’s “clipboard guy,” said.
It’s the way things are done at Duke: the Coach K way, the right way.
Most college basketball teams have student managers. They field rebounds during warm-ups and provide towels during timeouts. But at few programs is being a manager taken quite so seriously as at Duke, where everything related to basketball is taken very seriously. In Krzyzewski’s 38 seasons, the Blue Devils, who play Rhode Island in the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament here on Saturday, have made 12 Final Fours and won five national championships. They carry themselves as though these accomplishments are always top-of-mind. That extends to the managers’ ethos, which is so … Duke.
“Everything they do is elite,” the freshman guard Alex O’Connell said of the men who fetch balls and towels for him — and as with many managers of men’s teams, they are all men.
Duke’s managers are part of the tight-knit family of Coach K managers, present and past. They praise a network of alumni that helps them after they graduate, with former managers now serving in basketball positions everywhere from Harvard to the Oklahoma City Thunder to Duke itself. Krzyzewski pitches recruits on using Duke basketball to set themselves up for life in the sport and beyond. So do the managers.
Even Duke managers with no basketball aspirations see the program as a springboard, as opposed to most college basketball managers, for whom the job is a way to get the best ticket in the arena. “With Coach K, I felt like I had the opportunity to learn about excellence and how to build excellence from the ground up,” Spiera said.
Ask the managers about their jobs, and they will articulate the ideology of Duke exceptionalism.
“I think the culture we have is really special,” Zach Marcus, another senior manager, said. “It’s a testament to Coach K, the program he’s established.”
Everything they do is deliberate, specific, thought through. They wear matching uniforms, typically polo shirts, slacks, belts and Nike sneakers. During the opening segment of practices, eight of them line the court — three to a side, one under each basket — with a ball under an arm. During one drill, rebounding is a three-manager job: one under the basket, another in the corner, a third at the top of the arc next to a coach. At halftime, they sprint to the locker rooms to get them ready before players and staff arrive. After games, their duties done, they meet and critique their performance.
In-game timeouts are their shining moment. These are like Nascar pit stops. During Thursday’s 89-67 first-round win over Iona, Spiera raced from his seat at the far end of the bench to the first one, pulled it out — creating a passage between the bench’s front and back sides — and placed it facing the bench, so Krzyzewski could sit and face the five players in the game. Then he assumed his clipboard position. It all took about five seconds. After timeouts, the managers rushed to towel off the coaches’ seats, which had just been occupied by sweaty players.
If Duke is Rome and the players are the gladiators, or perhaps the generals, then the managers are the Praetorian Guard, the emperor’s personal division. There is no need to clarify who the emperor is in this analogy.
Kevin Pauga, Michigan State’s director of basketball operations, was a Spartans manager. He now administers a postseason basketball tournament for team managers. (Duke’s managers did not play the five regular-season games requisite for qualifying, he said.)
“Every school handles their managers just a little bit differently,” Pauga said. “Everyone has their nuances, whether it’s tied to a head coach or a specific program.”
They know they are mocked on the internet: for making an impromptu privacy tent out of towels as Marvin Bagley III recovered from a poked eye earlier this season; for just constantly running (“Were they slow on filling the Gatorade cooler?” a Kentucky fan wondered).
Their response, in standard Duke fashion, is to point to the scoreboard.
“At a certain point, you realize you get to be part of the best program, you go to a really good school, some people are going to try to attack you for those things,” Karamardian said. “If you just understand they’re only attacking you because you’re really good at these things, then who really cares?”
