Last August, Duke's baseball team was as dirty as a shortstop's jersey buried in the corner of its disheveled locker room. In walked Sean McNally, the clean-cut, 33-year-old head coach who had replaced the ousted Bill Hillier just a month earlier, barking orders at one of nine players he would soon let go. He had no choice but to wipe clean the walls of the locker room-and an undisciplined program marred by scandal.
In a Duke athletics overhaul similar to the one just set in motion for a men's lacrosse team swarmed by rape controversy, the baseball program received a charge straight from President Richard Brodhead's office to paint over allegations focusing on steroid and coaching abuse uncovered in an investigation by The Chronicle a year ago.
The entire baseball team had passed a steroid test the week after that story. The University had begun deliberations on its new and improved drug enforcement policy-one that remains open to doping's high summer season. The top administration's informal investigation had found "steroids were never the major problem," says Executive Vice President Tallman Trask, reflecting on one off-the-field headache he oversaw as he continued to cope with the lacrosse team's new and bigger one.
But McNally had to bring the hammer down on a team accustomed not only to losing but to losing for the mercurial Hillier regime. Before the players could descend on Durham for another year, the new coach had thrown all their equipment and personal effects in trash bags, whitewashed the locker-room walls and prepared to tell even returning starters they would have to earn back their varsity status.
"Our whole philosophy in the fall was that it was a tryout period-earn your spot in the program, earn your locker," McNally says, opening up publicly for the first time about personnel changes and steroids, with a Blackberry and notecards sitting on the desk that once belonged to his disheveled predecessor. "And the guys who are in the program certainly did that."
Junior Eric Baumann was Duke's returning leader in home runs-albeit on a team that hit just 18 in 53 games-and followed McNally's order to gut the locker room about three weeks before the start of this school year. He, like the rest of the team, was excited to leave a tainted era behind-every player tested negative in another team-wide steroid sweep the first week of classes. But by McNally's first team meeting, it became clear that steroids were not on the agenda-discipline was.
"He seemed pretty angry," Baumann says of McNally. "It seemed like he was almost disgusted, and he told us we had no pride for Duke baseball, that is was a disgrace how the locker room was."
McNally announced that, after a September full of wind sprints and stadium climbs, October's "Fall Ball" would amount to nothing more than tryouts. By Halloween, 13 non-seniors with eligibility were gone from last season's roster, with at least six cut and three quitting during an unpredictable and threatening few weeks usually reserved for spring training-type drills.
Players who survived say they could not tell why certain former teammates were cut, and Baumann and J.J. Koterba were also at a loss because McNally gave the same reasons for why he cut them-almost verbatim-that he gave to other players who also didn't make it, they say.
"It's around 9 o'clock," says Koterba, a junior and last year's starting third baseman, "and I get in there and he says, 'You're from a different regime-a past regime-you won't be able to contribute to this team at all, you have zero out of five baseball tools, and anything we can do to help you transfer, we'll help you out,' And I was out of the meeting by 9:02.
"I've played baseball since like six years old. I love the game," Koterba says. "This guy ended it."
Baumann says he received exactly the same message when he was cut at the beginning of October, when he was still recovering from shoulder surgery but felt forced to max out on throwing-a problem frequently cited by players as evidence of Hillier's coaching abuse.
McNally maintains that he revamped his roster-now down to an ACC-low 22, with several players playing out of position-based on "baseball decisions." In the fall, McNally says, "my emphasis was not on the big picture of how many games we can win but on what your personal goals are for improving."
McNally, a 1994 Duke graduate, aggressively tracks his players to make sure they attend all classes and eight hours of team study hall per week. The only visible adornments in the stark new locker room are two signs boasting players' GPAs this year.
It's a far cry from Hillier's "fuck your buddy" motto, where players aggressively competed against each other on the field instead of for McNally's approval of their attitudes.
"My goals for next year are to continue to build this infrastructure, the way we run our program-the disciplined, organized structure," McNally says. "And I think, in this process, the last thing to come is wins on the field."
Indeed, the new "regime" has had trouble winning with Hillier's remaining players-Duke was on its way to finishing with a losing record for the eighth-straight season-and Koterba said McNally had "chastised my goal," albeit ambitious, of being the third-best team in the league. "'You'd be lucky to finish in the bottom three,'" he remembers McNally saying.
Associate Athletic Director Chris Kennedy, who currently oversees the program and led the coaching search, says he cannot judge the revamping of the baseball roster and that "it's too early for me to assess what's going on in that program.
"I like what's going on from the outside-the condition of the locker room, the field, the academic performance," Kennedy added. "They're all functions of more discipline."
Brodhead and his team are sitting comfortably in the Allen Building, letting another disappointing basketball season soak in and leaving Joe Alleva and his team in Cameron to their business. Blind-sided by allegations of abuse stemming from a non-revenue athletic program's aggressive culture, Duke goes into scramble mode-statements, investigations, policy changes.
Twice.
If Duke's baseball steroid scandal was any sort of small warm-up for the media-crazed lacrosse frenzy, it's clear that the University administration has the power to begin an athletic program's overhaul from across campus-just maybe not the follow-through in working with the athletic department to solve every last issue.
Trask says there was "a lot of traffic" after The Chronicle's investigation, which led directly to the formation of a committee to review-and ultimately revamp-Duke's athletic drug policy. The result is more aggressive punishment for performance-enhancing drug use, splitting the penalties for steroids (one year for a first positive test and loss of eligibility for a second) and street drugs.
Even after several months of close examination by the committee, the new drug policy fails to close a major loophole-Duke cannot test off-campus during summer vacation. The Chronicle's investigation revealed that the vast majority of steroid use by Duke baseball players occurred in their home towns or while playing in popular summer leagues.
In late March, the NCAA acknowledged that its testing program also left ample time for athletes to shoot up during the summer and have steroid cycles out of their bloodsteams by the start of fall classes. Beginning this summer, the NCAA will test several players from every Division I baseball team-whether they are on campus or not.
"It is true that somebody who goes off to the Cape Cod League or something, we're not going to be travelling up there to test them," Kennedy says. "That's probably an unavoidable problem, and I'm not naive enough to think that people who are knowledgeable of performance enhancers aren't always one step ahead of the testers. We will be testing people in the summer who are on campus."
Steroid screening at Duke increased dramatically this year, including a third team-wide test of baseball players sometime after McNally cut down his roster. Baseball has not been the only focus, as increased testing across all Duke sports-from about 150 individual tests per school year up to 300-has come in conjunction with the new policy.
But the recent dramatic increase in baseball testing echoes the program's screening increase after steroids were found in a player's room in Fall 2002. That player, Grant Stanley, told The Chronicle he used steroids the previous summer, though both the University and athletic department administrations still contend that, as Trask says, "the steroid issue was never really the main problem."
Now McNally has begun to deal with attitudinal problems, whipping into shape a roster he sees as more in line with Duke's values; he even banned his players from tailgates and facebook.com, and players who were cut say they're not allowed to interact with some players still on the team.
And as those who were cut or forced to quit move on and think about transferring-four have-Duke and McNally feel like they've already taken the necessary strides to shed the program's past sins, steroids and all.
"This is an issue I'm really passionate about," McNally says about steroids. "And I saw it on teams that I played on, and one of the defining moments of my career is that I made the conscious choice not to do that, and I wanted to get as far as my ability would take me.
"Obviously it's something that I've discussed with our players and that I will continue to address, because the goal and the vision and the mission statement of our program is to get the most out of your ability the right way, naturally."
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