When former Blue Devils Christian Laettner and Brian Davis made a $2 million contribution to the Duke Basketball Legacy Fund this past summer, they both said they were thrilled to still be involved with a basketball program and a school that had given them so much as student-athletes.
"Today they are really taking care of family," Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski said at the press conference announcing the gift.
Entering his 26th season at the helm of the Blue Devils, Krzyzewski has worked hard to foster a community atmosphere where everyone who has either worked or played for Duke feels like the men's basketball team is "their program."
The sense of a "Duke Family" is a culture that has blossomed since Krzyzewski arrived in Durham in 1980, and it has been successful, he said, because of the continuity that has existed within the program over the past few decades.
What Krzyzewski has created since he reached his first Final Four as Duke's coach in 1986 is a program whose household names have served as big-brother figures to the teams new lifeblood.
"That's the thing that's really made us for all the years," Krzyzewski said. "Grant Hill was helping [Jeff] Capel. Laettner and [Bobby] Hurley were helping Hill. [Johnny] Dawkins was helping [Quin] Snyder and [Tommy] Amaker was helping him. [Mark] Alarie was helping [Danny] Ferry and Ferry was helping Laettner."
The lineage between Blue Devils past and present is continuing this year on a team that features the unique dynamic of four scholarship seniors, five freshmen and only a lone active sophomore between the two classes.
"I know for me I had the ultimate respect for them because that's who I grew up watching," Duke's all-time three-point-shooting leader Trajan Langdon said of some of his predecessors. "The older I got, the more I realized as much as they were helping us, we were helping them to get ready for the season."
Redick, who said he lacked a true senior mentor when he was a freshman, still managed to become good friends with a lot of the program's more recent alumni.
"I come and work out with the guys and I'm around them a lot," said former Blue Devil Chris Carrawell, who lives in Raleigh. "We want these guys to do well because they're representing Duke University and us. We get to brag on these guys, so giving advice to them is only going to make them better and make Duke University better."
With many of his former players playing in the NBA and in other leagues around the world, Krzyzewski said it has become increasingly more difficult for him to keep tabs on all of them, especially during the season.
But associate head coach Johnny Dawkins and the other assistants have welcomed that role and understand its importance. Dawkins prepares workouts for past players who wish to train in Durham during the summer, and the whole staff is hoping that more of the program's greats will return to the school during the offseason once the team's planned practice facility is built.
The interaction between the Blue Devil alumni and current players is most evident at events like the annual K Academy, an adult dream basketball camp. Around 20 of Krzyzewski's former players attended the event this summer, bridging together nearly three decades worth of talent.
"You get Laettner and his crew coming back and now they're messing with the younger guys, Dunleavy and Jason Williams-you've got a lot of history right there," Carrawell said. "A lot of schools-I've talked to a lot of players-they don't have this. What we have here is kind of sacred because you get guys coming back, and guys who are happy to see each other."
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