With its best ever finish in the Directors’ Cup standings, Duke showed it could compete with the traditional national athletic powerhouses despite financial deficiencies.
Two years after athletic department officials released a mission statement that admitted winning the Directors’ Cup—a national competition that ranks schools’ overall athletic departments based on NCAA championship finishes—was no longer a feasible goal for the program financially, Duke has secured a top-five finish for the first time in its history.
The Blue Devils captured a national championship in women’s golf, five additional top-five finishes, and 11 total top-10 finishes. Duke currently sits in fourth place in the standings with just the results from the College World Series to be added. Since Texas has clinched at least a top-four finish in baseball, it will pass Duke when the final standings are released June 29.
Stanford has already clinched its 11th-straight Directors’ Cup, sponsored by the United States Sports Academy, followed by UCLA and Michigan.
In addition, Duke will finish first among schools in the ACC for the second time in the 12-year history of the competition. The first occurred during the 1998-1999 academic year, when the Blue Devils finished a then-school-best 7th.
Duke has accomplished this despite drawing from a smaller recruiting pool and working with a tighter budget than most programs that consistently finish at the top of the standings, Senior Associate Athletic Director Chris Kennedy said. In 2002, the athletic department decided to maintain the status quo within the program, rather than increase funding for existing athletic teams or reduce the overall size of the department.
“What we realized at the time was that would necessitate allocation of university resources out of proportion of what we thought the benefit would be,” Kennedy said.
The athletic department anticipated that the Duke program could field a few teams that would compete for a national title each year but would lack the consistency across all sports to compete for the Directors’ Cup.
The Blue Devils have historically remained out of the running for the Directors’ cup title, averaging a 23rd place finish. Duke, however, consistently ranks among the top private schools. Since the publication of the 2002 mission statement, the program had finished 21st in 2003 and 18th in 2004.
This year, however, the program’s stellar finish has provided a measure of hope for the future, and 2005’s results could be topped in 2006.
“[This year] it was a very strange sense of circumstances,” Kennedy said. “Who would think that a men’s soccer team dominated by freshmen would do as well as it did? In soccer, it was an issue of very young talent being ready to take on this level of competition right away. In men’s lacrosse it was...an issue of maturing talent. We had a lot of things fall right for us.”
Among the Duke teams that challenged for a national championship this year, few have lost significant senior talent and many are expected to compete for national titles again next year.
Kennedy attributed the program’s success to the strength of Duke’s coaches and the recent improvement of the school’s athletic facilities. In the last five years, Duke has tackled a number of facility upgrades that have helped its teams during practice and competition, as well as in recruiting. These improvements include the completion of the Yoh Football Center and Schwartz-Butters Athletic Center, as well as renovations to the tennis facilities and Koskinen Stadium. Plans for a new basketball practice facility have also been approved by Duke’s Board of Trustees.
“I think some of it is a consequence of how much better our facilities are now than they were five, six, seven years ago,” Kennedy said. “I think that it’s an enormous advantage in recruiting.... A kid shouldn’t be making a decision based on a locker room, but it sure has an impact.”
The Directors’ Cup, which is presented annually by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics, rewards points for a school’s 20 best NCAA finishes (10 for men and 10 for women).
Mike Van Pelt contributed to this story.
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