Jon Scheyer was the primary Blue Devil assistant coach responsible for discovering Jack White in Australia and recruiting him to Durham, and he must have been proud of the sophomore forward's energy that sparked an 18-0 second-half run.
But Scheyer wasn't on the bench to see it.
He had more important business to attend to.
Scheyer left Duke's win against Notre Dame Monday night at halftime to get to the hospital for the birth of his first child, 12 days early. The former Blue Devil guard has been an assistant under head coach Mike Krzyzewski since 2014 and got married to Marcelle Provencial in May 2017.
"Just in case you were wondering why Scheyer left, it wasn’t because I wasn’t listening to him," Krzyzewski quipped after the game. "She went into labor this afternoon and the doctors said it would be a long time—you know how those doctors are, they’re not right all the time, so we said, look, whenever. And he said, 'Coach, I got to go,' and I said, 'Damn right you got to go. Get out of here.'”
Krzyzewski did not know whether the baby girl had already been born at the time of his postgame press conference.
"I haven’t gotten an update yet," Krzyzewski said. "No one’s tweeted me or snapped me or cracked me or called me or whatever the hell you do right now."
Scheyer was a four-year player at Duke and started at point guard as a senior for the Blue Devils' 2010 national championship team. His brief professional career was hampered by a serious eye injury, but the 30-year-old is already widely respected as an up-and-coming coach. In an anonymous survey of coaches around the nation last summer by CBS Sports, Scheyer was tabbed as the most likely assistant to become a coaching star.
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