If football and basketball are the only Duke sports you follow, then this time of the year can seem awfully empty. And certainly there’s no spring sport at Duke that is going to attract 20,000 or 10,000 or maybe even 5,000 fans.
But there’s more going on than you might think. Duke has 10 spring sports, two each of tennis, golf, lacrosse and track and field. Plus softball and baseball.
I haven’t even mentioned spring football and that popular basketball spin off “who’s leaving, who’s staying and who’s coming in?”
And yes, I plan on writing about hoops sometime. But the ground seems to be shifting an awful lot these days. Down the road. When the dust settles from the shifting ground.
Back to the so-called Olympic Sports.
A number of these Duke teams and individuals are nationally competitive. Women’s tennis and men’s lacrosse are both coached by men who’ve coached national championship teams at Duke and both of those teams are poised for deep runs in the post season. Men’s tennis is having its best season in years and softball and women’s track and field are pretty close to nationally elite.
Now both golf teams are okay but nothing special and the same can be said about women’s lacrosse.
It’s surprising that Dan Brooks and the women’s golf team are ranked ranked 29th nationally but some of his more recent high-profile recruits haven’t panned out and it’s hard to make up for that when you’re bringing in two or so players per year.
Which brings me to the National Pastime. Baseball was my first sports love and I’m talking late 1950s here. I remember Harvey Haddix pitching 12 perfect innings and losing in the 13th in 1959. I remember Elroy Face going 18-1 out of the bullpen the same season. I remember Casey Stengel botching the Yankees rotation in the 1960 World Series, the Maris-Mantle race of 1961.
Which brings me to Duke baseball, the source of some pleasant spring afternoons in the sunshine and gentle breeze for decades but rarely more than that.
Duke went 54 years between NCAA Tournament appearances, 31 consecutive seasons without a winning record in the ACC. Under Bill Hillier Duke went a combined 6-41 in ACC play in 2002 and 2003.
Still, I wondered. What would happen if Duke hired the right coach and gave him the resources necessary to compete against the ACC powers?
We found out when Duke hired Chris Pollard following the 2012 season. Aided by significant salary and facility upgrades, Pollard got Duke to a 16-14 ACC mark in his second season at Duke and into the NCAAs in his fourth. Duke was one win away from Omaha in 2018 and 2019 and captured the 2021 ACC Tournament. His 2020 team might have been his best. But COVID wiped out that season. Recruiting classes were nationally ranked, one after another after another.
The future was so bright you had to wear shades.
Then it all came crashing down. Duke entered the 2022 season nationally ranked. They ended it at 22-32 overall, 10-20 in the ACC. Duke not only missed the NCAA Tournament, they missed the ACC Tournament.
Missing the ACC Tournament takes some doing. The ACC has 14 teams playing baseball; Syracuse is the outlier. Twelve make the ACC Tournament. Duke and Boston College stayed home last year.
What happened? There were some injuries, some bad luck, some under-achievers and yes, some chemistry issues. Pollard told the media this February that not everyone was rowing in the same direction.
Has Duke turned it around? With 32 games gone I can state with absolute certainty that the answer to that question is, definitely maybe.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to JimSumnerSports to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.