STEROID CHARGES ROCK DUKE BASEBALL

A lost coach Over nearly six sub-.500 seasons, Hillier has lost not only games but also his players—at least 22 players have left the program during the six years Hillier has coached. Numerous current and former players said Hillier’s demeanor and often blatant negativity directly contributed to the Blue Devils’ low team morale, personal doubts and losing record. All these are issues that the Athletic Department has acknowledged and is considering. “We’re not pretending that the transfers are not a source of concern. They are—they absolutely are,” Kennedy said. “They’re high nationwide in baseball. We don’t think they should be as high here as they are nationwide, so the fact that we’ve had kids leaving is a real thing we’re thinking about.” Many of the morale problems in Duke baseball pre-date Hillier, said Kathleen Smith, professor of biology and faculty athletics representative. “That’s one of the reasons the coaching change was made. And it improved, certainly in terms of the interviews we had,” said Smith, who conducts exit interviews with student-athletes. Although some players praised Hillier’s care for their personal lives, several former and current players told stories of how Hillier’s moods would suddenly shift and how he belittled them on and off the field. “When you have people saying, ‘Man I need to find something that I can injure so I don’t even have to play anymore the rest of the season’—I mean, people want to go home,” said a second current player, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They want to get out of this.” Hillier’s players said he is a traditional coach who demands punctuality, hard work and continual improvement. When he was hired, he expected to turn the baseball program into a conference championship contender. “My expectations were much higher than Joe Alleva’s, and I don’t think I’ve met them,” Hillier said. “Not even close.” Duke baseball has not been a top ACC program since the early 1960s. Under head coach Steve Traylor from 1988 to 1999, the Blue Devils went 356-286, but only once finished better than .500 in the conference. Alleva and the Athletic Department knew Hillier from when he had been a Duke assistant, and then associate, baseball coach from 1987 to 1994. After Hillier served as head coach at UNC-Asheville and went 97-175, Duke brought him back to Durham as head coach in 1999 based partially on the reputation he had for bonding with his players when he was an assistant coach. “He had inherited a program that was down, and he was trying to build the program,” Alleva said. “He had some tough luck with some injuries, and I was giving him a chance to build a program. “I think I’d much rather err on the side of being fair,” he added, “than being too quick.” Hillier’s first season the team went 17-41, the losingest season in Duke baseball’s history. Although the team had broken .500 in seven of the previous eight seasons, Hillier has not had a winning season during his entire tenure. Part of Hillier’s initial strength was in his ability to recruit players. By the time Hillier had one season behind him and a full year to survey the country, he brought in one of the top recruiting classes in the country. That class looked as though it could spark the turnaround of Duke baseball. But only one of those nine players, who would currently be seniors, remains on the traveling roster. Even with those recruits, the team has been wracked by injuries. Approximately 20 arm surgeries alone have been performed during Hillier’s tenure, players said, and several players have had multiple major surgeries. Kempster and Calliham both recall their arm surgeon, Higgins, telling them the number of surgeries was abnormally high and that the team’s lifting and throwing schedule may have contributed to the problem. Higgins said he may have said with “some exacerbation” that there was a rash of surgeries at certain times but the number of injuries at Duke is not higher than that of other elite athletic programs. The surgeon said throwing and lifting consecutively could cause injury, and the team of doctors and trainers continually evaluate training practices in an effort to increase the workout’s focus on flexibility. By mid-May 2002, five starting pitchers were injured, and Hillier was forced to send inexperienced underclassmen to the mound, only making winning more difficult in one of the nation’s toughest conferences. “I probably didn’t do my homework well enough and signed some kids who were injured coming in or who got injured after the fact,” Hillier said. He added that training and medical staff now take more steps to be aware of existing vulnerabilities to injury. They also concentrate more on preventative training when players arrive. Even with the new precautions, current players Greg Burke and Danny Otero are the top two pitchers in the ACC in games started, combining to start 24 of Duke’s 35 games so far this season. Hillier said Burke and Otero generally throw fewer pitches per outing than their conference counterparts, and his other starters are considerably less talented than his top two, necessitating the high number of starts. Although injuries certainly played a part in the Blue Devils’ losing record, the players’ frustrations may have been both a cause and result of the team’s losses. “When guys get recruited to go play baseball in college, we are all used to being the guy who gets all the playing time and notoriety,” said Ryan Sember, the remaining senior on the traveling roster. “When you are not playing, you look for excuses. I think a lot of guys have taken that out on coach and blamed their problems on him.” Stanley and other players credited Hillier with standing up for them and forging off-the-field bonds. Hillier has worked to help secure jobs for some of his players once they have left the program, Sember noted. But many players said the jovial man who recruited them to Duke is unpredictable on the field. Jerdan said Hillier often implemented game strategies that “nobody understood.” Off the field, Hillier sometimes employed unconventional tactics to understand his players’ personal problems. In Spring 2003, just months after Kempster’s suicide attempt, Stanley’s arrest for steroid possession and Layden’s citation for marijuana possession, Hillier distributed a questionnaire to the entire team. Players were asked to identify teammates who had the highest propensity for behavior detrimental to the team, who had the most talent and who worked the least. Players said the questions were meant to target specific individuals. Hillier said the players were never forced to call each other out. “They could have turned it in blank if they wanted to,” he said. The questionnaire was just one example of what players said is the intensely competitive climate on the team. “When you are practicing it is every man for himself. There is no team concept at all,” Calliham said. “Our team motto was ‘Fuck your buddy.’” But other players said Hillier was simply trying to motivate a team that sometimes showed less than 100-percent effort when morale dipped. “He’s just competitive. He wants to win; we all wanted to win,” said Kevin Perry, who became a volunteer assistant coach during his senior year in 2003 after an injury shortened his career. “I never had a problem with his tactics or styles.” “If he thinks you’re not working hard enough, he’s going to chew you out,” Broadway said. “That’s good. You needed that when you’re a young player who needs to learn discipline. Even in regular life, when you’ve played for him, you feel you’ve got a natural pressure to everyday life.” Hillier expected so much on the field, players said, that he repeatedly suggested players put baseball before their academics. Hillier said he told his players that academics and baseball should have “equal importance” in their lives. Brent Reid, who left the program in 2000 after two and a half seasons, said he was mocked when he asked Hillier to accommodate his studies. He said Alleva preached “balance” between the two primary realms of a student-athlete’s college life, but the baseball coach straightly ignored this message. Other players echoed Reid’s sentiment, emphasizing lackluster advising that fell short of the Athletic Department’s promises. “At Duke it was fuck school, fuck this—all we care about is baseball,” Jerdan said. Hillier said he took interest in his players’ academic lives. “They can do both,” he said. “I have a lot of guys who we adjust our practice schedule to, because of academics. I think I understand what a good education is worth.” In a March 2005 NCAA report evaluating retention and academic progress of student athletes, Duke’s baseball team barely cleared the acceptable threshold while every other school program well surpassed the academic progress rate. The team still exceeded the national average in its sport, even though the transfer rate and several major academic problems depressed the figure. Calliham, Kempster, Stanley and several current players all said alcohol and marijuana are prominent parts of social life for many people on the team, and Hillier maintains a laissez-faire attitude about alcohol and marijuana consumption—endearing him to his players. “He said you guys can smoke pot, just don’t get caught,” Calliham said. Calliham also alleged that Hillier challenged them to drinking contests. Kempster and Calliham said Hillier was routinely drunk while conducting room checks when the team was on the road. Hillier denied that he ever drank in front of his players. Disciplinary issues, he said, are dealt with on an individual basis. “Most of that stuff comes from my bosses,” he said.   Communicating conclusions About a week after he took office, President Richard Brodhead received a letter dated July 6, 2004 from Calliham. In the letter, which The Chronicle has obtained, Calliham described his frustrations with Hillier and the team’s losing record, as well as more specific issues relating to team morale and transfers. One sentence in the middle of a two-and-a-half page letter says: “Steroid use was also encouraged and tolerated.” Brodhead responded in a July 22 letter. “As president,” he wrote, “I would normally leave these types of matters to our Director of Athletics, the person with most direct responsibility for them. However, I will make a point of talking with him about your experiences.” Since the time Calliham played baseball at Duke, the University has reminded the medical team to watch for signs of steroid use, reached out with more extensive academic resources and increased the scope of drug testing for baseball, Kennedy said. Brodhead replied to Calliham Sept. 22, telling him he discussed the issues with Alleva and was “satisfied with his and his staff’s handling of the situation.” Both Brodhead and Alleva told The Chronicle they did not discuss steroids at that time. “What made me say that I was satisfied was that I learned the process of consideration going back to 2002, which spoke to these concerns, gave us assurance that some of these were not sources of worry, and gave us assurance that others—not the steroid one—were subjects of ongoing conversation with the coach and the team,” Brodhead said. Brodhead told The Chronicle Wednesday: “What seems very clear to me is, at that time and then going forward, an appropriate step was taken to look into the situation and to try to find out its parameters and address it in an ongoing way.” Alleva confirmed that he gave Brodhead background of the baseball program, but he did not specify that he mentioned steroids. “This was three years after that,” Alleva said when The Chronicle directly asked him. “And we had no evidence of any steroid use on the team.” No baseball player has tested positive for steroids since 2002, according to the statement issued by the University Wednesday. The same statement also explained that Duke found some of the complaints to be without substance. Others were found to be isolated incidents. Some complaints were deemed sources of concern, and the University said Alleva has addressed them with Hillier on several occasions. Alleva said Wednesday he had not seen the improvement he required when he discussed Hillier’s contract renewal before the start of the season. “Overall, I am obviously not pleased with where we are in baseball right now,” he said. Putting his time with Duke baseball in perspective, the first unnamed current player said the team’s problems might be fading away. “It’s a different atmosphere. I will say this: the way things were freshman year, the ways things were sophomore, that was when the biggest problem was,” he said. “The problems that we have today, they’re ones that’ll happen forever if he stays here—they’re ones of overpitching, overplaying, brow-beating, hitting people—all that stuff will never change until he leaves. Steroids, I think that’s on its way out the door.” Although Hillier declined through a spokesperson to speak further with The Chronicle, he said Monday that he has coached the team as well as he could. “When you look at everything, go back and look at the history of Duke baseball,” Hillier said, “yeah, I think I’ve done as good a job here as anybody in the history of Duke baseball.”