Goestenkors brought winning attitude to Duke

Twenty-five years ago, the very first Blue Devil women's basketball team took the floor. In the final part of a three-part series, The Chronicle looks at the Gail Goestenkors era.

In a cramped board room cluttered with papers and coffee cups, the future of Duke basketball hung from the ceiling like a deep Chicago fog.

Pressures from both sides of the University had made the head coaching position difficult to fill, and when even success wasn't guaranteed to be the team's goal, the board room was tense and progress unlikely.

Ruling over it all was longtime Duke athletic director Tom Butters. His hiring of an unknown Mike Krzyzewski a decade earlier had made him as much a part of the Duke sports landscape as Cameron itself.

But between page after page of resume he flipped through in 1992, Butters wasn't looking for another Krzyzewski-he was looking for a caretaker.

Butters' relationship with former coach Debbie Leonard had all the pleasantries of a cheap hotel. The two feuded, and after building the program literally from the scrap heap, Leonard, whose financially deprived team stumbled to a 14-15 record in 1992, had had enough. But the shoestring budget the team operated on didn't leave with her, and support from all sides was lousy.

"Everybody told me not to take the job," says Gail Goestenkors. "They said there was no commitment to winning."

There was, of course, the small hitch of not being on the short list of candidates, but the funny thing about opportunities is that if you keep knocking hard enough, you either get in or you break the door down.

Her lone head coaching experience had been sandwiched between lunch and algebra at a middle school during her junior year in college, but Gail Goestenkors just didn't care.

Pigheaded, as always.

By the time she got a second interview, she had left the short list of four forgettable names behind. By the time she spoke with Tom Butters in that cramped board room, she knew she had the job, and more importantly, she knew that caretaker wouldn't be in the job description.

"An hour after I left, I knew I would get the offer," Goestenkors says. "I knew, despite what I heard, that I could win here."

Spurred on by the success of the men's team at Duke and the women's team at Stanford, which, under Tara VanDerveer had gone from dead last in the Pac-10 to a national championship in five years, Goestenkors made up her mind that Duke women's basketball would soon be a national power as well.

Even Butters was swept up in the hubris of the 29-year old coach-"Wait five years and I'll win a national championship," she would've told you with dead-eye earnestly in those days.

The athletic department responded. Scholarships went up, salaries went up, support went up.

"[Butters] understood he couldn't tie one back on me," Goestenkors said. "He put everything out there to be successful."

Off the court, success was immediate.

Less than half a year into the job, Goestenkors signed the nation's ninth-ranked recruiting class.

Long roads and short nights made the first years the toughest, but Goestenkors never backed down. She won her first major battle before her first game, getting highly coveted Kira Orr to sign with Duke-picked to finish last in the ACC-over defending NCAA champs Stanford. She sold her on the idea of building a program, and Orr, who watched the Cardinal win another title her freshman year at Duke, never looked back.

"I have a great deal of respect for those who helped build the program," Goestenkors says. "They took a gamble on us, they trusted us."

Goestenkors kept the program rolling like a truck down a mountain highway, never falling into the periods of stagnancy that had plagued Leonard before her.

It was never easy, but when she needed a win, she got one.

Down 22 points to No. 4 Virginia in the 1995 ACC tournament, Goestenkors rallied her team to a stunning double overtime win. Orr stole the game, hitting a buzzer-beater in the end of regulation and another buzzer-beater to win it, but Duke, for the first time, stole the national spotlight.

There were heartbreaks along the way-the quadruple overtime loss to Alabama in the NCAA Tournament-but they only put the brakes on the team temporarily. Wherever there was a Coach G, there was a way.

Pigheaded, as always.

Players blossomed under Goestenkors like flowers in a hothouse-entering Duke as scrappy overachievers and working their way through as All-ACC selections. Players like Georgia Schweitzer, who entered Duke with all the hype of low-budget film turned into stars overnight.

And after six seasons of thankless work, from players like Ali Day, Jennifer Scanlon, Orr and Ty Hall, there came the unforgettable 1999 season.

Led by two transfers from the now-distant Purdue-seniors Michele VanGorp and Nicole Erickson-Goestenkors had her most talented team ever. But a late season sputter left doubts. Two losses to Clemson, including the ACC semifinals, sounded like the death knell of the team.

But they rallied.

And they won.

And on one night, they even did the impossible-knocking the NCAA's one-team answer to parity, the three-time defending national champion Tennessee Volunteers, out of the tournament in the Elite Eight.

"That was the greatest win," Goestenkors says with a smile still as wide as the court itself, "Not only did I get to see my dreams lived out, but everybody's dreams were lived out."

Two games later it was over.

Fittingly, Purdue carried home the trophy, but at the end of the decade, the would-be caretaker had taken a team that started the decade a Midwest mile away from a national championship to within 20 minutes of its first. And sitting in her office, so close to the cramped board room where it all began, Gail Goestenkors has it all mapped out for the future.

"I want to spend the rest of my career at Duke," she says, "and I want to win a national championship."

Pigheaded, even in the 21st century, as always.