Duke head women's basketball coach Gail Goestenkors was just a sophomore in high school when she had her first taste of coaching. A point guard on her high school team, she had a coach who had never played basketball and knew nothing about the game. So Goestenkors, who knew a little bit about basketball from her coaching father and her basketball-playing brothers, met with her head coach to plan strategy.
"He and I got together and we looked at a book, Basketball Drills, and we decided what offense we wanted to run, what defense we wanted to run," she recalled. "I called all the timeouts for the team, because he didn't have a feel for the game. What I missed out on are the finer points, but the thing I gained was a lot of confidence and a real feel for the game."
Little did she know that years after looking in a book for coaching strategy, she may be able to write the book on how to turn a basketball program around. The 1996 Atlantic Coast Conference Coach of the Year has turned the Blue Devil women's basketball program into a national powerhouse in merely four years.
Goestenkors has known since her freshman year at Saginaw Valley State she wanted to go into coaching. As a point guard, she was the coach on the court, calling the plays and making decisions. During the summer, she found a job to stay at school and to become immersed in basketball. She finished her collegiate career as an NAIA All-American, with her collegiate team compiling a 114-13 record during her four years.
After college, Goestenkors took a graduate assistant's job at Iowa State. One year later, collegiate coaching doors swung open for the recent graduate. First, her coach at Saginaw Valley State, Marsha Reall, was offered a job at Ball State and took Goestenkors with her. One month later, Reall was hired as head coach at Purdue and hired Goestenkors as one of her assistants. When Reall left Purdue after the year, her replacement-Lin Dunn-retained Goestenkors as an assistant. Dunn was known to give her assistants numerous responsibilities, and Goestenkors was more than willing to handle them.
"When Gail came to work for me, the thing that impressed me right off the bat was her work ethic," Dunn said. "The other thing was her ability to relate to the student athlete. She made the players feel comfortable."
At Purdue, Goestenkors learned much of her coaching strategy. One of her main responsibilities was recruiting. She quickly learned how important it was to attract quality people to build up a program. Four years after her Purdue debut, the Boilermakers won the Big 10 title.
"I think the thing that I learned was that if you bring in the right people, you can see a lot of success and it doesn't have to take a long, long time," Goestenkors said. "But you have to bring in the right people. It's not necessarily the best players, but it's the players that want to be the best."
Dunn said the main reason Goestenkors is such a good recruiter is her work ethic and her sincerity. She explained that Goestenkors has the knack to enter a recruit's home and immediately make the prospect and her family feel at ease.
In 1991, Goestenkors applied for the opening at Duke. Among all of the candidates interviewed, she wasn't even among Blue Devil athletic director Tom Butters' short list to replace Debbie Leonard. Goestenkors was the fifth choice of the five candidates Butters interviewed. But just 20 minutes into the interview, Goestenkors knew that Duke was the perfect fit. She didn't give Butters a specific number of years on gaining a conference or national title. She simply said there was no reason Duke could not win a national title.
"I felt that Duke was looking for someone exactly like me, and I was looking for something exactly like Duke," Goestenkors said. "And I think that's how Tom Butters felt once we got into the meetings. I could see with many of the beliefs I had, he got more and more excited as the meeting went on."
Goestenkors felt the key to building Duke's program was recruiting. She told Butters that she didn't want to create a program that had one or two good seasons and then faded away. She wanted to build from the bottom up and establish a winning tradition at Duke. In order to accomplish that feat, she needed to attract great players with great attitudes to Durham.
Goestenkors knew that task wasn't going to be easy. In her first year at Duke, the Blue Devils were picked to finish last in the ACC. And that's exactly where they ended the season, with a 3-13 conference record. Goestenkors had to convince players like Kira Orr, who was being recruited by Stanford-the preceding year's national champion- that coming to Duke meant joining a up-and-coming team.
The philosophy of her recruiting comes from a plaque that hangs in her office. It reads: "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Goestenkors uses that ideal over and over again in recruiting. She also uses imagination-forcing the players to think of how far a recruit could help take the program.
"The first time I met with Kira, this office was bare, just a wooden floor and cement," Goestenkors recalled. "We started off by sitting in here and I said, 'You have to picture this. This is going to be my office. There's going to be a nice coach here. I'm going to have a desk. It's going to be beautiful.' Then we went to the locker room. 'It's going to have a big screen TV with oak lockers.' We had none of that.
"Now you have to picture us playing against Virginia and there are people in the stands, and we beat Virginia... Now picture that we are in the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament. How does it feel? If you can't picture it, don't come here, because that's what I see and that's what I believe and I'm not going to recruit somebody who doesn't believe the same thing that I do."
Orr said the main reason she signed with Duke was that there was something different about the Blue Devils. When the coaching staff visited Orr, it honestly assessed the situation and where it hoped Duke would be in the next few years.
Goestenkors' message attracted five players in her first recruiting class. Four of them-Orr, Tyish Hall, Windsor Coggeshall and Shaeeta Brown-remain at Duke and have all played integral roles in Duke's rebuilding process. She acknowledged it took a lot of courage for that first class to come aboard.
"They come in and they are young, enthusiastic and completely prepared," Orr said of the visit Goestenkors and assistant coach Gail Valley made to Orr's Maryland home. "When you sit down and think about it, you think, 'I think they can get this thing going. They know what they are talking about.'"
With that first recruiting class, Duke improved to 16-11 overall, 7-9 in the ACC. While many of the upperclassmen were satisfied with the 16 wins, the freshmen were stunned-they had never won that few games in season. A power struggle ensued, with the current leadership being satisfied and the new blood of the program wanting to do more. Goestenkors said the transition was tough both on the players and on herself. But it symbolized a program that was evolving into a top-25 team.
Last year, she again hit the recruiting trail with full force, except now the message to a recruit was, 'You can get us into the top 15.' The message worked, as Goestenkors signed six players, including two Parade All-Americans in Hilary Howard and Payton Black. This past year, when Duke signed four players in November, the message was, 'You can get us over the top, to get to the elite level.'
Every day when she enters her office, Goestenkors views the two crystal balls for the two national championships the men's team has captured. She is hoping soon to be able to add one of her own to Duke's collection. That dream seemed farfetched years ago, but now is closer than ever to reality. It's a dream Goestenkors always has had in the back of her head since she began coaching.
"I know I need to win a national championship," Goestenkors said. "It's not something I want to do, but something I need to do. But I want to do it the right way, not at the expense of anyone. That means building a program, and that your players learn-not just about basketball, but academically. They learn about life.
"That means as much to me as a national championship. And I believe you can have both."
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