UNRIVALED AMBITION

It was a banner moment for Duke Fencing. In fact, you could say it was the banner moment for one of the University's most anonymous programs. Rebecca Ward, an incoming Duke freshman, stepping up to an Olympic podium twice in Beijing, a bronze medal her newest necklace.

After the initial celebrations died down, there was only one question left in students' minds.

Duke has a fencing team?

Ahh, yes. Non-revenue sports. Fencing, rowing, wrestling.

They are the ones where the players are identifiable only by their affection for official team gear (if at all) and who actually take classes with you (sometimes participating). They are the sports that make the Inferno rewards seem less and less worth it each semester.

And they're costing Duke nearly $11 million each year.

But perhaps this is all a little reductive. After all, most of the non-revenue teams aren't half-bad. They've been to final fours and won national championships and now bronze medals. In fact, maybe we should be talking about non-revenues a little more. They may not earn money, but they're earning victories better than just about any other university in the country.

For the athletic department, however, the priority is clear. In the department's long-range plan, released April 26 and loftily entitled "Unrivaled Ambition"-now we're getting meta-the word "football" appears 36 times in 39 pages. For purposes of comparison, basketball gets 28 mentions while soccer takes the bronze with 10.

That, however, pales in comparison to the golden goose of college football and recently appointed Director of Athletics Kevin White's former employer. Notre Dame, with its BCS berth and its lengthy national television contract with NBC, earned a whopping $63.7 million in 2006, with nearly $46 million of that as profit.

In other words, the Fighting Irish made as much profit from football as Duke made revenue from all 22 of its sports teams. To say White is operating with a smaller profit margin would be like saying Mike Nifong could have handled the lacrosse case with a tad more tact.

White's already expanding on the Strategic Plan's blueprint for the renovations of Wallace Wade Stadium, meaning even more money is being poured into the football program.

At most universities, that means a slow death for men's non-revenue teams, as the added expenses tied to football forces their Title IX proportions off-kilter.

Exhibit A: Rutgers, which after a stunning turnaround from a Duke-like stupor to Big East contender decided to axe six non-revenue teams from the male side of the ledger.

But White, with his business background and tradition of strong fundraising efforts at his previous gigs, has brought his own approach to Durham, one that focuses more on adding than subtracting.

"Joe [Alleva's] idea was we need to find more revenue," explains Deputy Director of Athletics Chris Kennedy. "Kevin's idea is not just to find more revenue, but to hire somebody who's going to bring with them these corporate connections that are going to be pretty fruitful pretty quickly."

It's the last part of that statement that bears watching. According to the Strategic Plan, nobody should be watching what happens on Saturdays at Wally Wade more intently than the non-revenue teams, most of which have bet their financial futures on the potential equation of White + Cutcliffe = Ws and $s.

But even within the non-revenues, there are haves and have-nots. The split essentially demarcates the championship-contending programs from the not-quite-there-yets, and it's based solely on scholarship allotment.

Sports with the maximum number of scholarships include baseball, field hockey, golf, lacrosse, soccer and tennis. It's no surprise that all of them-with the exception of the upward-trending baseball squad-have been wildly successful over the last two decades. It was men's soccer that got the ball rolling with the University's first-ever championship in 1986-the fulfillment of what can be called Duke's original non-revenue strategic plan.

In the early 1980s, then-AD Tom Butters and then-President Terry Sanford decided to focus their athletic finances on the sports with the easiest paths to success-the ones that would attract players who, in Kennedy's words, "could fit in at Duke and do the academic work." It wasn't a coincidence that those sports also didn't require the same number of scholarships that other non-revenues did.

"You looked at the size of the team as well," Kennedy adds. "You can have a nationally competitive golf program with 4.5 scholarships; it takes 18 in track."

Track, then, became one of those purgatorial non-revenues playing without a full deck of scholarships. Fencing, rowing, swimming and diving and wrestling are in the same hand, and none of them have achieved the same national success as their advantaged brethren.

To make matters worse, the Strategic Plan isn't painting a glass-half-full portrait of reform:

"The first step toward excellence is to offer more scholarships," it reads. "In the short run this will not be easy. If we maintain our current array of scholarship sports and if there is no infusion of university funds for this purpose, the addition

of the new scholarships will only be possible as a result of increased fund raising, and/or the generation of increased

revenue by the football program."

And so, at the very bottom of the Strategic Plan's itinerary, by itself on an otherwise blank page,

it states, "As Funding Permits: Add scholarships for Olympic sports."

On the second floor of Card Gymnasium, through a side entrance, across the basketball court and up some back steps, rests a doormat with the word FENCING etched in capital letters. The man whose office is just through the door refuses to see the relationship between the décor and his program's status. Head coach Alex Beguinet understands his program's position on the athletic hierarchy, but that doesn't mean he accepts it. The roundabout route and creaky wooden hallway that lead to his office belie its elegant interior. It might just be the classical music playing in the background as he works, or it could be that Beguinet has made a career at Duke of doing more with less.

A tireless worker, Beguinet has maximized the limited resources handed over to his program each year, translating them into some of the best facilities in the nation. Beguinet's enthusiasm, effortless and sometimes intimidating-after all, how could you be this excited by fencing?-has reached a fever pitch this autumn. Ward's success in Beijing has given his program unprecedented publicity among the students, the faculty and even his fellow coaches.

"They come up to me, people I don't know, and they talk to me about what is happening," he says, almost incredulously in his trademark French accent.

"It's nice because it makes people realize it's not only the big sports.. Wrestling, fencing, swimming, track: We don't get that much recognition, right?"

He doesn't wink or even smile, but he doesn't have to. Beguinet knows this is as much attention as fencing may ever get at Duke, that it won't be confused as a club sport, at least for the time being. His initial goal is that the buzz surrounding Ward lasts long enough to attract a larger audience for the Blue Devils' lone home meet: the Duke Invitational in February. At the same time, it's clear he has bigger goals in mind, like the one that lingers by itself on that otherwise bare page of the Strategic Plan.

"More scholarships," he says, for once matter-of-factly, when asked what prevents his teams from competing on the highest level. "A lot of people want to come to Duke, but another school can give them money. They want to come to Duke; they don't want to go to the other school. But then you're talking about how much is Duke versus what they can get from someplace else, and the parents are put in a situation where they tell the kid, 'Sorry, go there because of the money.'"

Ward is currently the only Duke fencer with a scholarship, handed down by Alleva. Beguinet doesn't know if and when he'll get another chance to hand out what amounts to a $200,000 check to a high school recruit with White on board (while his old boss just went by Joe, Beguinet still calls the new sheriff in town Mr. White).

He does, however, recognize the cause-and-effect relationship that the Strategic Plan lays out between Saturdays at Wallace Wade and his own program.

It's not like fencing hasn't benefited from football in the past. The opening of the Yoh Football Center in 2002 allowed Beguinet to move his team to a new practice facility, one that his fencers laud as one of the nation's best. But again, that doesn't mean he's comfortable with the dynamic.

"It's always hard to depend on someone else's resources. That should not be, but like everything else, it's not what you want, it's the department," he concedes. "I wish football the best. but I don't like the fact that I have to depend on somebody else."

Some non-revenues know better than to shackle themselves to football's on-field future.

But the sports capable of moving toward self-sufficiency are the ones that haven't had much trouble piling up the victories. Just take a walk from Beguinet's office in Card, down past Krzyzewskiville, and into the Sheffield Tennis Center, built in 2000.

There, also on the second floor (this one's carpeted), you can find Jay Lapidus, the former men's tennis head coach just named director of tennis in the off-season. Lapidus' new responsibilities include heading up fundraising efforts-like the one that helped build his current digs-while managing both the indoor and outdoor facilities.

Duke Tennis has seen a facilities boom over the last decade, with the construction of Sheffield, renovations at Ambler Tennis Stadium and the installation of a comprehensive video system all occurring since 2000.

But Lapidus' promotion to a newly-created position maintains the spirit of the Strategic Plan.

"The facilities message is simple: more or less continuous improvement is central to the ability to attract the best coaches and athletes and thus to win."

In some alternate universe, on a Monday afternoon in late August, a horde of Triangle media crowd around Raleigh-Durham International Airport as a Duke athletic hero emerges in the terminal.

It's Ward, the 18-year-old freshman, returning from Beijing, two medals in tow.

It's a dream.

For in the real world, only one man at Duke can command such a fete.

In the real world, everyone knows you can't spell Duke without K. In the real world, everyone knows that bronze, even two of them, ain't gold.

Bronze isn't unrivaled ambition. Bronze is just the start.