Coach G: Her father, her history, her program

She would have scanned the rows behind the Duke bench for his face, but she knew he was not there.

She would have searched quickly and precisely through the team seats in the San Jose Arena with her cool gray eyes, cool gray eyes that had seen a man become a father and a father become a friend, eyes that are smooth like cobalt under a smile but that flash like lightening when she yelps, eyes that saw her team become a program and a program start its way to legend.

She would've stopped in the middle of the Final Four, sat her clipboard down on one of the white-covered arena chairs and she would have hugged him because she had made it and because she was going to make it and because they both knew.

But John Goestenkors, her father and her friend, was not there and she knew it.

"I wanted him there," she said, "but he said he couldn't bear watch, it made him too nervous."

The world had taken the daughter away from him in a sense, adopted her as a symbol of a University and a sport. The family name, which stumbles off the tongue with the stop-and-go staccato of Manhattan rush hour, Guess-ten-cours, which she had kept even through marriage, had been truncated and turned into a Duke brand-Coach G.

But more than she knew offensive schemes, defensive assignments and fast-break lanes, she knew it didn't matter.

"We're a lot alike," she said. "We share a love of the game."

He was still a fresh-faced engineering senior at the Rolla School of Mines when he met her mother. By 21, the two were married and shortly after the birth of their third child, Gail, they had moved to Waterford, Mich.

Like baseball had been to the generations before him, basketball was a metaphor for John Goestenkors. He didn't have a catch with his kids in the backyard; he had one-on-one or H-O-R-S-E and it meant more somehow and he knew it.

The two boys took to the game first-he began coaching teams to work with his sons-then his daughter simply took the game.

Long after her brothers passed the game by, she was still daddy's little girl, playing for her father's teams until ninth grade when she started playing for her school.

When she wasn't practicing with her father or practicing with the team, she worked odd jobs- delivering newspapers, raising rabbits, mowing lawns-to keep playing.

And in there somewhere, she learned the most important lesson of coaching-a player is never just a player.

When she graduated from high school, she learned the second rule.

"I didn't get a scholarship offer," she said. "There were a lot of shut doors."

The thing about doors is this-you keep knocking long enough, either somebody is gonna answer or you're gonna break the thing down.

A decade later, with the future of Duke basketball hanging over a board room table like a thick Chicago fog and the name Goestenkors synonymous only with risk, she would remember everything she knew about doors again.

But as a senior in high school in 1981, philosophizing about life meant less time living it.

So she walked on at Saginaw Valley State. A year later she had her scholarship and a year later she knew she was on the wrong side of the bench.

And that is when Gail Goestenkors became Coach Goestenkors II.

She coached a seventh grade girls' team at a local Michigan school. The rules were simple: Cut nobody, play everybody.

Yeah.

"I had 17 players on that team," Goestenkors said, "and I learned exactly two things. One, I wanted to coach. Two, not seventh grade basketball."

If you believe the legends of Cameron, the plans for the grandest arena in the Southeast were drawn on the back of a matchbook. Fifty-seven years later, the plans for Duke women's basketball were drawn in absolute darkness on the back of eyelids.

Kira Orr was her first recruit. She was all but Stanford bound until she met a young coach who promised her the world and anything else she could carry on the way. Barely seven years out of college and fresh out of an assistant coaching job at Purdue, she was too young to understand just how big a challenge she was in for.

Claiming the golden fleece was a bit of a difficulty. Goestenkors had an all-out challenge.

She did not have a desk to sit behind, so they sat on the locker-room floor, surrounded by pink lockers, little steel boxes that stood testament to the uphill battle she was facing.

She told Orr to close her eyes.

Then she told her to believe.

She told her in a way that was so pure it was poetic, so idealistic that it was a dream and so impossible that it was real.

Orr believed. Duke was born.

By the time Orr was a senior in 1997, the advice of a summer-league coach had long since ceased having much bearing on her ("He still offers advice to me," she said, "but I've learned it all already"), but the coach-player relationship she had learned from him never went away.

Her father was there in every player, in Kira Orr or Ty Hall, Nicole Erickson or Rochelle Parent.

And when she did not win Orr the ACC title she promised, or when she had to watch Peppi Browne writhe on the floor in pain after tearing her ACL against UNC, she didn't feel like she had let down a player, she had let down a daughter.

"It was tough not winning for Kira," she said. "And then watching Peppi go down was probably the hardest thing I've ever had to deal with as a coach."

One hundred and seventy six wins belong to Gail Goestenkors in the Duke record books.

In her heart, she knows they just have the wrong first name.

"When, not if, we make it back to the Final Four," she said, "he's going to be there."

In the background, a dull electronic ring interrupts the quiet of her sun-filled fourth-floor office. She casts a quick glance backward, thinks for a second and picks up the phone.

It wasn't her father.

But everything else was.