In 2008, the Duke athletic department unveiled a strategic plan for the future.
Titled “Unrivaled Ambition,” the plan’s key objectives included changing the culture around the football program, beginning major construction projects and providing more support to Olympic sports as well as additional scholarships.
Delayed a few years by the 2008 economic downturn, that plan is largely coming to fruition. Football head coach David Cutcliffe has taken the Blue Devils to three straight bowl games, and a series of construction projects have wrapped up with several more ongoing—including renovations to Wallace Wade Stadium and Cameron Indoor Stadium.
In December 2013, Duke announced it was expanding the number of scholarships for several women’s sports—rowing, fencing, swimming and diving and track and field—and would add softball as the school’s 27th varsity sport. The softball program is scheduled to start competing in spring 2018—joining 11 other ACC schools that currently field a team—giving Duke a few more years to deal with the personnel and facility logistics of adding a new sport.
“With our weather and in this part of the country, softball’s got a chance to be a big winner here on our campus, and I think it will,” Kevin White, Duke vice president and director of athletics, said.
Duke last added a varsity sport in 1998, the first year of the rowing program. That first year on the water marked the third sport added in a 10-year span, following women’s soccer in 1988 and women’s lacrosse in 1996.
Associate Director of Athletics for Compliance Todd Mesibov is overseeing the build-out of the program and noted that the department has already received interest from players who would be entering college in fall 2017—the first academic year Duke expects to field a team. The program expects to phase in scholarships until 2021, when it will offer the maximum 12 full scholarships allowed by the NCAA.
The next step in the process is to give those interested families a face with which to communicate—a head coach.
“We want to have someone in place this summer so that person can get started building the program, building relationships with coaches and potential student-athletes and learning about Duke,” Mesibov said. “Ultimately, our goal is to find the right fit for the job—somebody who understands our values, has the ability to be successful at the level we want to be successful, which is with all our sports, we want to compete for championships, but also understanding the importance of school and academic success to our program.”
Duke began accepting applications in mid-April, and Mesibov estimated that by late May the athletic department had received between 200 and 300 applications for the position. Past hires for new programs have stood the test of time—women’s lacrosse head coach Kerstin Kimel has been in Durham since the program started in 1996, and rowing head coach Robyn Horner spent all 17 years of competition at the helm before retiring last month.
The addition of women’s soccer and women’s lacrosse was made easier by the fact that a facility for games, Koskinen Stadium, was already in existence. The nascent softball program is currently without a home—White said he thought Duke might be one of the only major universities without a softball field on campus.
The athletic department is considering several sites for a stadium, but Mesibov said one proposed location would be on East Campus. Currently, field hockey is the only varsity program that competes on East. If the new facility does end up being built there, opportunities for efficiency and shared space will be pursued, as was the case with the newly-constructed Kennedy Tower at Koskinen Stadium and Morris Williams Track and Field Stadium.
“[We’ll see] if there’s some overlap that can be useful or in the planning in terms of training room services, equipment room services, sharing visitors’ locker rooms or other things just to be efficient with what we’re doing,” Mesibov said. “Both from financial reasons, from space reasons, we want the facility—wherever it ends up being—to fit in well with existing structures, the existing feel of campus, all of those things. We’ve been coordinating a lot with different parts of the University to make sure those things are happening.”
Planning for the new stadium is still in the design phase, and the department hopes to break ground next summer with the goal of having the facility ready by the first day of classes in August 2017.
Although there has never been a varsity program, Duke has offered softball as a club sport since 1975. According to the club’s website, the squad competes against Division II and Division III schools in the fall and spring and plays its home games at a venue off campus.
Recruiting decisions will be left up to the head coach once a hire is made, but Mesibov said he anticipates that some contingent of students already enrolled at Duke will join the program for its first few years.
“We expect that there’ll be some students who enroll next year, meaning ’16-17, eventually anticipating that they will be part of the varsity program,” he said. “They’d likely participate on the club team for that year and would then be part of the [varsity] program. There may be students here already who played in high school and either chose not to pursue it in college or chose to come to Duke where we didn’t have a program but might be interested.”
Success has been quick to follow the addition of programs in the past. Women’s lacrosse has been to the NCAA tournament 18 times—including a Final Four berth this spring—and women’s soccer advanced to the national championship game in just its fifth season of competition.
“I think it’s fair to assume that there will be some growth that happens in the early years,” Mesibov said. “[But] we think the draw of the University, among other things, means that we’ll have some very good softball players and very good students on campus very quickly.”
Amrith Ramkumar contributed reporting.
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