In a cramped office in Cameron Indoor Stadium's front corridor, amid a small gallery of brown boxes and an assortment of photos of former players, Gail Goestenkors leaned back in her chair and began to tell one of her favorite stories.
It's a story about Rochelle Parent-21 now, but forever 17 in Goestenkors' story-that she starts telling, and it's the story about everything that has taken Goestenkors and Duke women's basketball down the long road from also-ran to national power: a little luck, the right personnel and a big leap of faith.
"I still have it," she says as she exchanges a smile for her attention, glancing at the fading daylight outside. "We get letters from hundreds of players every week, but this one was special."
It was more than three years ago that it all began, but it was less than 30 feet away from that same Cameron office.
The foyer of Cameron was completely deserted. It was a late spring afternoon in 1996, and the cheers and hoopla from basketball season had long since faded into the North Carolina sky. All that remained were a few relics of seasons past-pictures on the wall, national championship trophies sparkling in the day's last light-but otherwise the arena of legends was left to its ghosts.
Into the emptiness walked a high school junior, strolling past pictures and trophies with little more than a pause. She walked up to the heavy wooden doors and pulled on the handles, but the doors wouldn't give. Disappointed, she stood staring at the darkness inside and, for just a moment, what she saw, or what she thought she saw, would have her coming back forever.
From the darkness emerged a single player, draped in a blue and white Duke uniform, a ball tucked under her arm. She stood there and met the gaze of the girl standing at the door, a smile of recognition creeping across that high school junior's face.
That player was her.
Soon enough, she would simply be known as Ro inside those walls, but before Ro was Ro, she was Rochelle Parent and Rochelle Parent was locked out.
In the language of recruiting hyperbole where the next Nancy Lieberman is a bounce pass away, Parent was only the next Rochelle Parent-a nobody.
She wasn't highly recruited, and nobody had paid to fly her in first class. She hadn't even been invited. And if she hadn't been visiting a friend at nearby Fayetteville Methodist University, she might never have been there.
But she was, and in the empty echoes of Cameron Indoor Stadium, she told herself she'd be back.
Parent went home that day without getting inside the gym, and were it not for what she did next, she might never have.
It was a letter she sent back, a four-page letter, earnest and well-crafted, from a girl who wanted to get into Cameron.
But that letter wasn't addressed to Gail Goestenkors. It was addressed to Linda Grensing, then the volleyball coach. She had decided that she wanted to play basketball for the Blue Devils-at least get a tryout-and if
The letter meekly asked for a questionnaire, but it got passed on to Goestenkors. Parent never got her questionnaire, but what she got was even better-the attention of the coach.
"I didn't know her, she didn't know me," Goestenkors said. "[The letter] said she was visiting Duke and the doors to Cameron were locked, but she looked in and she was so amazed and so impressed that she imagined what it would be like to wear a Duke women's basketball jersey and play for Duke University."
But as moving a writer as Parent may have been, she wasn't a Semeka Randall or a Nikki Teasley. So the letter, like a thousand before it, was returned to the file.
Then came a lucky phone call.
The voice on the other end was an AAU coach in Ohio. There was a player Goestenkors might be interested in, not all that highly recruited, but an outstanding athlete. She'd be at the D.C. Nationals (the final large-scale event of the year), he said. Her name is Rochelle Parent.
It only took Goestenkors a moment to connect the name with the letter she had received weeks ago, and because of that one letter, the recruiting of Rochelle Parent began.
At least, that's the way Goestenkors remembers it.
As for Parent, the story isn't about Duke recruiting her, it's about her recruiting the Blue Devils.
"It was different for her because she goes out and gets people and I got her," Parent says. "But for me, it's not out of my character to do that. When I want something I go and try and get it."
The stopover at Cameron had been nice, the campus gorgeous, but what sold her were the days of research she put in on the school when she returned home. Before her trip to Fayetteville, she knew next to nothing about Duke. "I had seen a few men's games on TV," she admits, "but I didn't even know where Duke was."
So Parent sat down and found out all there was to know about the university she was falling in love with.
And then she wrote the letter.
"It was something I wanted to do," Parent says. "It was a positive risk, nothing bad could come out of it. Sure, she could not write me back or not send a questionnaire, but I had other schools. All of a sudden I didn't go, 'I have to go to Duke.' I just really wanted to."
Which brings the lifelong hopes of a girl to a three-day showdown.
Parent had just a handful of games in which to sell herself, one player out of more than 800. For coaches, it was like finding a hook-shot in a haystack.
"I just tried to relax and play, but that doesn't always work out," Parent says. "I started getting nervous and tense and I remember turning the ball over a couple of times. But I also remember I played really really good defense that game. Offensively, it went downhill."
But Goestenkors didn't care. Parent wasn't as skilled as the other players, and her offense left a lot to be desired, but her tenacity and her defense slowly began to win the coach over.
"I watched her play the first time, and I liked her," Goestenkors says. "Then I went a second time and like her more. Then I went a third time. I kept going to watch her because I wasn't sure. Then finally it was her work ethic. It wasn't her offense, it was her defense."
After three days, Goestenkors was almost ready to offer the all-but-unknown recruit a scholarship.
"I said you just can't go wrong with this kid," Goestenkors says. "She wants to be here, she's a hard worker, a good student."
Still, Goestenkors wanted her players' opinion. If the team didn't want Parent, neither did Duke.
But the same resolve and tenacity that won over the coach won over the team and in October, after Parent's official visit, Goestenkors answered the letter she'd never forget with the call Parent thought she might never get.
Parent's mother picked it up, and right away she told her daughter it was Duke.
"Rochelle, this is Coach Goestenkors from Duke," the voice said. ""We're going to offer you a scholarship."
Long Pause. Smile. Accept.
"It had been a 50-50 thing the whole time as to whether or not she'd offer," Parent says. "I was nervous all week... so when she offered I didn't say anything for a long time, and then I told her, 'I don't know if it's appropriate for me to say yes right now or if I'm supposed to talk to my parents, but I want to come."
And whether Duke got her or she got Duke, Rochelle Parent was finally the next Blue Devil.
Yet Parent's first two years weren't easy ones. She became the stuff of one-game legend when she shut down Chamique Holdsclaw in the team's unforgettable upset of Tennessee last season, but for two years it was injuries and low minute totals that were her career.
"To be on the bench, have them need a sub and look past me, that was very hard to deal with," she says.
Just before her sophomore year, while driving back from a visit to then-junior Missy West's Malone, N.Y., home with teammate Lauren Rice, Parent honestly thought about not coming back.
"It wasn't homesickness, I just didn't want to be here anymore," Parent says. "It could be anywhere, just not here. I didn't think I was good enough to be here. Freshman year was the longest and toughest year of my life and I was thinking, 'If I have to go through that again, I don't think I'll make it.'"
She did, because giving up would have been the easy way and in 20 years easy was never the way Parent took.
And now, the girl who as a junior in high school didn't even know where Duke was couldn't imagine being anywhere else.
"I kept hearing the echoes of 'that's the easy way out,'" she says. "Everyone would be disappointed with me... and I was raised not to give up. So I stuck it out and I'm glad I did."
And the coach who took a chance on the player nobody else wanted sits back in her office chair, smiling and waiting for one of her favorite stories to finally add a new chapter.
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