Just three days after losing in the NCAA Tournament, Duke is already beginning to reload not only for next year, but also for the 2010-11 season.
Seth Curry, the highest-scoring freshman in the country last season, will transfer from Liberty to Duke, his father, Dell Curry, confirmed to The Chronicle Sunday. The brother of Davidson star Stephen Curry, Seth Curry will sit out the 2009-10 season and return to the court as a third-year sophomore, per NCAA rules.
Curry spent Sunday on campus, visiting Mike Krzyzewski and touring Cameron Indoor Stadium and the team’s practice facility. Curry originally planned to visit other schools, but he committed to Krzyzewski before leaving Durham, Dell Curry said.
“It’s the best program in the country with the best coach—it’s hard to beat that,” Curry said. “It was just a great fit. We had other schools to visit, but we decided, hey, we’re going to go for the best first, and it was just a great fit. It was an easy decision.”
The 6-foot-3 guard averaged 20.2 points per game at Liberty, which finished 23-12 in Seth Curry’s freshman season. Like his brother, Curry was an unheralded recruit coming out of Charlotte Christian School, and he didn’t earn scholarship offers from any ACC school. But he burst onto the scene early in the season, scoring 23 points in his debut and following it up two games later with 26 points in Liberty’s upset of Virginia.
When he announced his intentions to transfer last week, the Big South Freshman of the Year said he sought a higher level of competition. Four other ACC schools—Virginia Tech, Clemson, Wake Forest and N.C. State—requested permission to speak with Curry, whose season high was 35 points.
Stephen Curry, who averaged 21.5 points per game as a freshman, led Davidson to the Elite 8 last season, and he led the country in scoring this year. Dell Curry said Seth Curry was a better high school player than his brother and that their strengths are similar. He added that Curry, who won’t turn 19 until August, will benefit from sitting out a year, because he is younger than most college players.
“If you compare them as college freshmen—and Coach K even said this today—it’s almost scary how similar they are,” Dell Curry said of his two sons. “Sitting out will be a major help to his game, in that he’ll hopefully grow a little bit, but he’ll get stronger, and he’ll get accustomed to being on Duke and being in practice and going against better players in practice.”
Curry is more of a shooter than a point guard, but he was forced to play point guard as a senior in high school and still thrived in the role, Charlotte Christian head coach Shonn Brown said.
Brown, who also coached Stephen Curry, added that it’s difficult to compare the two brothers.
“They both have great IQs, and they’re both unbelievably unselfish players,” Brown said. “They would score 25 in a high school game and at the end of the game, I’d be like, ‘What, he had 25?’ He might have six or seven assists, four or five steals, fve or six rebounds and they still involve everyone else on the team.”
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