Duquesne achieved its impossible March dream
After 47 years away from the NCAA Tournament, the once-hopeless Dukes are a part of March Madness again
Duquesne’s 2015-16 men’s basketball season ended as many of its previous 40 had, with a numbing sense of disappointment and the lingering, existential dread that the program would never again offer anything more than that.
A senior-heavy Dukes team that got off to a 15-7 start and ignited dreams of some kind of postseason appearance unraveled down the stretch, losing eight of its final nine regular-season games. As a 26-year-old reporter with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in what would be my lone full season covering the team, I made the trip up to Brooklyn to see if Duquesne, as the No. 11 seed of 14 teams, could miraculously rebound and make a spirited run through the Atlantic 10 Tournament.
It didn’t. In their matchup against last-place La Salle in the tournament’s first round, the Dukes lost by 15 to the worst team in their league, in front of a sleepy crowd of no more than 1,000 fans.
As loss after loss mounted in the final month of the season, I was flooded with questions from fans about the job security of fourth-year coach Jim Ferry, whose expected breakthrough season had quickly turned sour. In the hours leading up to tip-off at the Barclays Center, I asked Dave Harper, who was five months into his job as Duquesne’s athletic director, if Ferry was going to be back to work for a man who didn’t hire him (I didn’t quite phrase it like that).
What came from the conversation was a statement I received from Harper three days later acknowledging that Ferry would return, but in the moment, his tenor hinted at something else. There was going to be a change; it just wouldn’t be this year. Indeed, 12 months later, Ferry was out of a job, the latest in a decades-long line of coaches who had failed to awaken a corpse.
Eight years later, inside that same building at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush, Harper wasn’t discussing a coach he knew he was going to fire in a year, but celebrating on the court as red, white and blue confetti rained down from the rafters. That day, Keith Dambrot, the coach he had hired to replace Ferry in 2017, had pulled off the seemingly impossible and led the Dukes to their first NCAA Tournament since 1977 with a victory in the A-10 championship game against resident league power VCU. It took the better part of a decade, but a program that had seemed incapable of harboring hope was not only able to smile, but rightfully call itself a champion.
This week, Duquesne will be one of 68 names on a sheet of paper that tens of millions of people across the country fill out. What is an annual expectation for dozens of programs on this year’s bracket – simply making the tournament’s field – existed for almost two generations as a dream for the Dukes, a destination that seemed like it should be within reach even as it was agonizingly far away.
There’s at least one program in the 2024 tournament that had a longer wait to get there – Stetson, which had never been since moving up to Division I in 1971 – but nobody’s absence was as arduous as Duquesne’s.
Now, the onerous and omnipresent burden of 47 years of history is gone.
Duquesne: a forgotten college basketball juggernaut
The notion that Duquesne, until a few days ago, harbored one of the nation’s longest NCAA Tournament droughts would have once been inconceivable.
A program that enters this year’s tournament as a feel-good, plucky upstart was once a national power.
A nearly two-decade-long stretch between 1940-56 was the zenith for the Catholic university in Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood, perched atop a bluff overlooking the Monongahela River. During that period, the Dukes played in the NIT – which was the more prestigious tournament in that era – nine times and made it to at least the semifinals in six of those appearances. In 1940, they became the first team in the history of the sport to compete in both the NIT and NCAA Tournament in the same season. That Duquesne squad, which finished the season 20-3, lost in the NIT championship while making the school’s first and only NCAA Final Four.
Over six seasons from 1950-55, they finished in the top 10 of the final Associated Press poll five times. In 1955, they won the NIT, defeating Dayton, 70-58, in the title game.
At least some of Duquesne’s success came because of its willingness to do what other, predominantly white institutions in other parts of the country refused to at the time – recruit and play Black players.
The Dukes had their first Black player all the way back in 1916, when Cumberland Posey, who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016, came aboard and led Duquesne in scoring in three straight seasons. He joined the program just two years after it played its first game and, for the sake of historical comparison, 54 years before Kentucky desegregated its men’s basketball program.
Though Posey used the pseudonym Charles Cumbert to pass for being white, the Dukes’ history with minority players didn’t end there. By 1946, they had Chuck Cooper, a local product who became the first acknowledged Black player in program history. In his first season, Duquesne was set to face off against Tennessee, but upon seeing Cooper on the floor, Volunteers coach John Maurer said his all-white team wouldn’t play if Cooper were involved in the game. Though Cooper told his teammates he wouldn’t be offended if they played without him, Judge Sammy Weiss, the acting chairman of the Duquesne athletic committee, seized the gym’s microphone and notified the roughly 3,000 fans on hand that the game wouldn’t be played.
“Speaking as a Duquesne Athletic Council official, I insist that no player be barred from this game by reason of race, color or creed,” Weiss said. “The principle of the entire matter means more to us than a mere basketball game.”
Cooper went on to thrive in his time at Duquesne, earning consensus second-team all-America honors in 1950. Later that year, he became the first Black player ever to be drafted by an NBA team when the Boston Celtics selected him with the No. 14 overall pick.
The Dukes’ stand against Tennessee, and Cooper’s subsequent success, signaled to Black players and others from marginalized groups that they had a home at Duquesne at a time when many other schools weren’t nearly as welcoming.
Two of the stars who guided the Dukes to their lofty achievements of the 1950s, Dick Ricketts and Sihugo Green, were both Black. Once their time in college was over, Ricketts and Green were the No. 1 overall picks in the 1955 and 1956 NBA Drafts, respectively, making Duquesne the only school ever to produce the first pick in back-to-back drafts.
In 1954, nearly nine full years before Loyola Chicago became the first Division I team to field an all-Black starting lineup, the Dukes’ top four scorers that season were Black, helping lead them to a 26-3 record and a No. 5 ranking in the final AP poll. In the NIT championship that season, which it lost to Holy Cross, Duquesne’s starting lineup featured three Black players and two Jewish players.
Documenting Duquesne’s downfall
Three years after its NIT championship, the series of problems that ultimately torpedoed the Dukes started to emerge.
After a 10-12 finish in 1957-58, his first losing season in 24 years coaching at any level, Duquesne coach Dudey Moore left his alma mater to accept the same position at La Salle, where the Post-Gazette reported it was “believed he’ll get a bit more pay than on the downtown Bluff.”
Moore was the Dukes’ coach for 10 seasons, guiding them to a 191-70 mark during that time. For all of his ties to the school and the area – he was a Pittsburgh native who played at Duquesne from 1930-34 – the Post-Gazette noted that in Moore’s final season it “has been apparent...that Dudey was unhappy at alma mater.”
Only five years later, and after assembling a respectable 79-37 mark, Moore resigned after he was hanged in effigy on the La Salle campus following a loss to Saint Louis in the first round of the NIT. Despite being just 52 years old, he retired from coaching to teach high school math.
His successor at Duquesne, longtime assistant Red Manning, never came close to matching Moore’s greatest feats, but the program was still strong, making four NITs and two NCAA Tournaments across his 16 seasons at the helm, a time in which the Dukes went 247-138 and had just two losing seasons. Manning resigned in 1974 to become the university’s athletic director.
Three years after his exit, the program had one final triumph, when a team that entered the Eastern Collegiate Basketball League Tournament with a 12-14 record reeled off three consecutive wins to earn the league’s automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament, with future NBA all-star Norm Nixon scoring 67 points and dishing out 20 assists in those victories.
Following that, though, Duquesne sank to once unfathomable lows.
From the 1977-78 season through the 2016-17 season, it recorded just eight winning seasons. In its first 35 seasons in the A-10, from 1982-2017, it finished with a winning record in league play only three times. From 1972 through 2019, it had only two seasons with at least 20 wins. The Dukes haven’t appeared in the AP top 25 since 1972, a skid that’s still active. Just two of the nine coaches that followed Manning ended their tenures with a winning record – Mike Rice and Ron Everhart, both of whom, despite their respective achievements, were fired.
The program reached a different, more jarring nadir in 2006, when five of its players were shot after some of them tried to calm a man who apparently had been disruptive at a dance.
Explanations for the decline vary.
Perhaps above all else, Duquesne wasn’t able to attract the same kind of talent at the same volume that it once did. What had been something of a market inefficiency for decades – schools elsewhere allowing racism to overpower their desire to construct the best possible roster – vanished once the sport desegregated in all conferences and in all corners of the country. The Dukes, once a factory for NBA talent, stopped recruiting or developing players who could cut it at the next level. After having 33 players drafted directly out of Duquesne from 1950-83, it has had just one since.
In other instances, it was simply botching coaching hires, with each successive mistake making it that much harder to build the program back to something close to what it previously was.
Questions lingered, too, about the school’s financial and institutional commitment to the sport. Even in the moments in which it tried to be proactive, it backfired. That was likely never more evident than in 2011, when Everhart was fired after going 99-89 in six seasons, highlighted by a run to the A-10 championship game in 2009. His ouster came two days after it was revealed that star sophomore point guard TJ McConnell would be transferring.
When rationalizing the decision to cut ties with a relatively successful coach, then-university president Charles Dougherty wrote in a letter to board members that Everhart had “stalled at a modest plateau with our program” and that it was “clear that we will not be capable of moving to the next level of excellence with Ron at the helm.” While Everhart gave the Dukes something they hadn’t had in a generation – winning seasons and occasional postseason appearances – Dougherty believed Duquesne could be in annual contention for A-10 title, make periodic NCAA Tournament appearances and hold on to young, talented pieces like McConnell. Near the end of the letter, he stated that he was “confident that we can find a new coach who will build on what Ron has accomplished.”
He didn’t. A nearly three-week-long search settled on Ferry, who had guided LIU Brooklyn to back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances, but did so only after the school endured five straight losing seasons to open his tenure. Despite his insistence that he needed that much time to turn Duquesne around, an A-10 program couldn’t afford to have that kind of patience, especially during a period in which the conference’s lineup of coaches included Dan Hurley, Shaka Smart, Archie Miller, Bob McKillop and Phil Martelli.
After going 60-97 in five seasons and never finishing above .500, Ferry was fired in 2017.
Yet again, Duquesne was in search of a savior. And in its moment of greatest desperation, it got one.
The rise after the fall
Though it ended with an ideal result, the Dukes’ process to replace Ferry was a bit of a mess, at least as far as how it was reported.
At one point, Michigan State assistant coach Dane Fife was reportedly in “advanced talks” to take the job, but 70 minutes after that leaked, he ended discussions with Duquesne. Later that day, ESPN published a report stating that the Dukes had hired Ball State’s James Whitford, only for the Worldwide Leader in Sports to issue a correction noting that it inadvertently published a “possible” story about that move that “mischaracterized the status of the negotiations.” The situation had grown so outlandish that college basketball podcaster and former Ohio State walk-on Mark Titus had pushed his own candidacy for the job that, given everything that had preceded it, didn’t seem all that implausible.
“I was trying to sell a job where the perception was coaches go to die,” Harper said.
Within four days of that chaos, the search came to a sudden and satisfying end. By hiring Dambrot, Duquesne had done more than secure the services of a proven winner at the Division I level. It landed its white whale.
For years, university leadership coveted Dambrot, believing he was the man who could lead the Dukes back to glory. He went 305-139 across 13 seasons at Akron, where he led the Zips to six Mid-American Conference regular-season championships and three NCAA Tournament berths. He was, perhaps most famously, LeBron James’ high school coach, with the NBA’s most famous player still very much a public cheerleader of his. Most of all, he had a reason to make what many might deem to be a lateral move – his father, Sid, had for the Dukes during their heyday of the 1950s and was one of the two Jewish starters on that 1954 team. Duquesne wasn’t just a new challenge at a late stage in his career; it was an opportunity to restore some of the glory his father and his teammates had worked so hard to build.
Despite that emotional pull, the Dukes had targeted Dambrot before, including in 2011 when Ferry was hired, only to be turned away. This time, however, with a new athletic director and university president, it was different, with Harper stressing to him that the school was ready to make a much-needed and long-overdue commitment to building a winner.
“At least on one other occasion, I didn’t come because I really didn’t think the university was really all-in to supporting the program at the highest level so they could be successful,” Dambrot said.
By his second season, Duquesne spent $5.86 million on men’s basketball, up from the $4.45 million it had shelled out just three years earlier. The university had plans to overhaul its musty and often morgue-like arena, the Palumbo Center, with a $45 million renovation that would turn it into a brighter, more vibrant fieldhouse bearing Cooper’s name.
Early on, the improvement expected under Dambrot ensued. In his first three seasons, the Dukes went 56-38, never finished below .500 and by his third season, they were 21-9, tying their highest win total since 1961-62.
Whatever hopes Duquesne had to end its NCAA Tournament drought were ended when the event was canceled that year in wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, depriving it not only of a chance to erase an ignominious bit of history, but sapping it of much of the momentum it had generated. After going 9-9 in the pandemic-altered 2020-21 season, the Dukes lost their top six scorers, five of whom entered the transfer portal only for some to not end up at an obviously superior destination (those five players transferred to SMU, Florida Gulf Coast, San Diego State, Kent State and Western Michigan). With a rapidly remade roster, they struggled to a 6-24 finish in 2021-22, their worst win percentage in 16 years.
If questions existed about Dambrot’s ability to achieve his ultimate and most grandiose goals, they were soon answered.
Yet again, Dambrot flipped his roster, this time by making several savvy additions. He landed Dae Dae Grant, the leading scorer for Miami (Ohio), who, sure enough, has occupied the same spot for the Dukes the past two seasons. Jimmy Clark III was a key reserve for VCU before he was dismissed from the program in 2021 for still-undisclosed reasons, but after a season at the junior-college level, Dambrot offered him a second chance and he has thrived, earning second-team all-A-10 honors this past season while being selected to the conference’s all-defensive team. The team’s Nos. 4 and 6 scorers, Fousseyni Drame and Andrei Savrasov, are both transfers – as is No. 8 scorer, Dusan Mahorcic, who is on his sixth school in as many college seasons in a journey that has taken him to the Division II, junior college and even Power Five levels before settling at Duquesne.
Dambrot didn’t just work in the portal. In 2022, he got commitments from two high-school players who are now among the team’s top seven scorers – David Dixon and Kareem Rozier. Then there’s Jake DiMichele, a freshman walk-on from nearby McKees Rocks, Pa. who was only recruited by Division II schools like Seton Hill (not Hall) and California (of Pennsylvania, not California) coming out of high school before spending a year in prep school and committing to the Dukes as a non-scholarship player. This season, he’s starting and is fifth on the team in scoring.
Over the past four seasons, 46 different players have recorded a statistic for Duquesne, an astonishing level of turnover, even in this day and age.
For whatever turbulence the Dukes encountered during stretches of Dambrot’s stint, they safely arrived where they hoped to. With wins against Saint Louis, tournament favorite Dayton, St. Bonaventure and VCU over a period of five days last week, Duquesne won the A-10 for the first time, earned its most wins (24) since Sid Dambrot’s senior season in 1953-54 and, at last, made it back to the NCAA Tournament.
Riding into the sunset
With his storybook ending secured, Dambrot announced on Monday that he would be retiring at the end of the season, which could come as soon as Thursday when his team, a No. 11 seed, takes on No. 6 seed BYU in the NCAA Tournament’s first round.
The timing is understandable, even beyond what his team had just managed to do on the court. Dambrot’s wife, Donna, is undergoing treatment for breast cancer and at 65 years old, he could sense the end of his career was approaching, anyway.
“I spent my whole life at this job, and it’s important to me. I tried not to cheat the job,” Dambrot said. “I’ve prided myself on being the first one in the office, working hard, trying to outwork everybody. I could see myself losing that edge at some point. I don’t want to end like that. I’m not built that way.”
He couldn’t have asked for a better way to leave the profession, not just for himself, but for those who had tethered their hopes to him.
In my time covering the Dukes, I’d often look out into the crowd at home games and be struck by the general profile of those in attendance. Beyond the handful of students, the arena was dotted with older fans, with one person who shall remain unnamed telling me that he had seen younger people printed on dollar bills than he had inside the Palumbo Center on a gameday.
What I saw in them, though, was something else. Many of those folks had been alive when Duquesne basketball represented something much more. Even though the ensuing years did little, if anything, to remind them of that feeling, they kept coming back. They were regularly frustrated and disheartened, sure, but something deep within them compelled them to return, game after game, loss after loss.
Enough time had passed that Nixon, the star of their last tournament team, had a 40-year-old son who played him in an HBO show depicting part of his dad’s career with the Los Angeles Lakers.
But still, through it all, they continued to show up. Finally, last Sunday, they got their reward.
(Photos: USA Today, Associated Press)