This was the first time Jon Scheyer felt any kind of pressure to prove himself. The first time he could sense others’ doubt and skepticism. He was in the sixth grade when he walked into a gym in Evanston, Ill., not far from his hometown of Northbrook, a well-off suburb outside of Chicago. By then Scheyer was already something of a basketball prodigy.
Taller than most everyone his age. Far better, too. And yet he wanted to be challenged.
Even then, at 12 years old, Scheyer sought to “get outside of my bubble” in suburbia, he said during a recent interview. “And my mom would drive me to every part of Chicago you could imagine” in search of a game, and a test. One day one of those drives ended outside of a gym in Evanston, and more than 20 years later Scheyer can still feel what he felt — the self-belief and maybe the fear.
He’s 35 now, and days away from his first game as Duke’s head coach. He is Duke’s first first-year head coach in more than 40 years. He’s succeeding the man who coached him in college, Mike Kryzyzewski, who won five national championships and 1,202 games, more than anyone else in the history of the sport. Scheyer is following perhaps the greatest who has ever done it.
Ask him to describe a moment that has prepared him for this, and Scheyer’s mind does not first go to his four years as a player at Duke, or the eight he spent on Krzyzewski’s staff. Scheyer instead goes back to that day in sixth grade. To walking into the gym and feeling the stares, hearing the snickers, while he entered what an old teammate recently recalled as “a hostile environment.”
Earning respect
In some ways, Scheyer’s ascent began there. The moments in and around Chicago that forged him during his adolescence set him on the path to play at Duke. And though he couldn’t know it at the time, Scheyer believes those moments prepared him for everything that followed. His journey to Monday night, to entering Cameron Indoor Stadium as leader of one of the most recognizable programs in college athletics, has deep roots in the courts and small gyms along Lake Michigan, and deep roots especially in Evanston.
Scheyer tried out that day for a spot in the Fellowship of Afro-American Men (FAAM) Youth Basketball League. In those days, the late 1990s, the league was a big deal, a local proving ground. It played a role in and around Chicago now occupied by higher-level AAU programs. If a young Scheyer could prove himself in FAAM, it meant he could probably hold his own anywhere.
He did not necessarily look the part. He was rail-thin and gangly, all arms and sharp angles.
“And they looked at me, the skinny kid from Northbrook, and they tried to punk me right away,” Scheyer said. The one player “who tried to punk me the most,” as Scheyer put it, was Thomas Nute, an eighth-grader who’d been a part of two consecutive championship teams at FAAM. To Nute’s chagrin, the coach of his team, the Sonics, liked Scheyer.
“Coach picks this white kid — no one knew who this kid was, at all,” Nute, now 36, said during a recent interview. “And then Coach is like, yeah, he’s going to be our starter. And we were like, ‘What!?’ ”
Scheyer became the only sixth-grade starter, alongside Nute and three other eighth-graders. Soon enough “you could tell he had game,” Nute said, and soon enough other kids in the league began trying to get inside Scheyer’s head. He was an outsider, in more ways than one.
“Mainly it was supposed to be like for African Americans, right?” Nute, who is Black, said of FAAM basketball. “The coaches were volunteer coaches, but they took this really seriously. Kids would call (Scheyer) ‘white boy.’ Some of the kids were not on the straight and narrow. They were involved in some things they shouldn’t have been involved with.
“So they would circle around him, sit right behind him — ‘This white boy can’t play ... He’s soft.’ ”
Scheyer proved otherwise. Nute, Scheyer said, became something like a big brother, a protector.
Little by little, Scheyer earned respect. He quieted the doubters. He proved he belonged.
“And so for me, I don’t think it’s any different now,” Scheyer said weeks before his first game as Duke’s head coach. “I think some people may believe I’m really good. Others may have some serious questions. But for me it’s that determination and belief. That doesn’t change, no matter if it’s sixth-grade FAAM, or if it’s the first head coach in four decades at Duke. That’s still the same.”
‘He was relentless’
Ask anyone from back home about Scheyer, whether it’s Nute or those with whom Scheyer remains the closest, and it does not take long for a common theme to emerge. The wording may be slightly different, but the sentiments are the same, ones that depict Scheyer as possessing a maniacal commitment to winning in any pursuit or endeavor. Basketball. Pool. Video games. Anything.
“Ultra competitive,” Dave Weber, Scheyer’s coach at Glenbrook North High, said, and he wasn’t only talking about the results that counted in the season but also pick-up games, scrimmages, summer shootarounds. “He was relentless. And he never wanted to lose at anything he did.”
Said Sean Wallis, one of Scheyer’s high school teammates who remains a close friend: “I’ve said this quite a bit, but I don’t know anyone that hates losing more than Jon. I think there’s something about being competitive, but there’s also something that’s a little different in terms of how he’s built. And it’s like, you don’t want to be around him when that happens.”
The loss that both Wallis and Weber most remember, as it pertains to Scheyer, came during Scheyer’s junior year. In December 2004, Glenbrook North, among the best teams in Illinois, played poorly during a 58-53 defeat against Evanston in the Proviso West Holiday Tournament. It was the tournament that every kid around Chicago grew up wanting to win.
Wallis and Scheyer went to it in their younger years, and Wallis could remember watching the likes of Michael Wright and Shannon Brown and others become stars in it. And here Scheyer and Wallis were, with their best chance to win it together (Wallis is a year older, and was a senior then) only for it to end in a miserable defeat after Scheyer missed a 3 that would’ve tied it in the final seconds.
“I’ll never forget being in that locker room,” Wallis said.
The next morning, Weber tried to take some time away. It was the holidays, after all, and he was with his family. Then his phone rang. It was Scheyer, then 17, wanting to talk about the game. About everything that’d gone wrong. About what the team needed to do to improve.
“I had to spend maybe 30 minutes on the phone with him, and listening to his thoughts,” said Weber, whose brother, Bruce, was then the head coach at Illinois and attempting to recruit Scheyer there. In his decades as a coach, Dave Weber said, just about every one of his players could sleep off a loss. Not Scheyer. “It was eating him up,” he said. “And he was right about some things.”
From there, Glenbrook North won 35 consecutive games, including the 2005 Illinois Class AA state championship. Scheyer didn’t lose another high school game for a year, until an 85-79 defeat against Proviso West in that same holiday tournament. And even then, Scheyer did everything he could to avoid defeat. He finished with 52 points — 21 of them in the final 75 seconds.
“I just blocked out all the shots I had missed before and played with my heart,” he told reporters afterward, according to the Chicago Tribune. “I wasn’t even thinking. But it wasn’t enough.”
A standing-room only crowd of almost 5,000 gave him an ovation. Krzyzewski sat courtside. By then, Scheyer had already committed to Duke, making him something of an outcast in Illinois. His future was set: excel at Duke, play 10 or 15 years in the NBA. Maybe then get into coaching.
Changing course
Three months after he led Duke to the 2010 national championship, Scheyer made the winning shot in an NBA Summer League game with the Miami Heat. For a player determined to earn a roster spot after going undrafted, and determined to prove the skeptics wrong, it was a promising start. In Scheyer’s second summer league game, he suffered the injury that changed his life.
It came in an instant. Joe Ingles, a Golden State Warriors forward, reached for a loose ball and instead poked Scheyer in his right eye. The blow tore Scheyer’s retina. He suffered what doctors described as “traumatic optic nerve avulsion.” Blindness was a possibility. He recently recalled what his lead doctor kept telling him after the injury: “It’s going to be hard for you to be the same.”
“I was determined to prove to him that I could be the same,” Scheyer said. “And I left the hospital that day and went in my driveway and made 23 out of 25 NBA 3s.” He knew it’d be a “tall task,” he said, but “if you beat me 10 times in a row, if we’re playing each other, I believe I’m winning the 11th time. I don’t get discouraged. It’s a matter of, I have to figure out how to beat you. And actually the more you beat me, the more I’m determined to beat you.”
And so Scheyer tried. He landed a preseason camp invite from the Los Angeles Clippers that September, but was cut about a month later. In February 2011 Scheyer found himself in a Chicago bar, watching the Duke-North Carolina game on television like anyone else, a player without a team. For the first time in his life he didn’t know where his next step would be on the court.
Scheyer tried to keep the faith. His friends tried to keep theirs.
“Not only was this a catastrophic injury, but it was a catastrophic injury to a guy who literally never sat out because of a sprained ankle or anything,” said Zach Kelly, another of Scheyer’s closest friends from Northbrook. “And so I think it was hard for the people around him to really know how to think about it. ... It was just really hard because he’d worked his whole life to get to this point. He was on the verge of it. He created a really good undrafted situation for himself.”
Scheyer found limited success overseas, but was never the same after the injury. In 2014 he changed course, without having played an NBA game. Chris Collins, like Scheyer an alum of Duke and Glenbrook North, offered Scheyer a spot on his staff at Northwestern. When Scheyer called Krzyzewski and asked for his thoughts, Krzyzewski told him he should come work for him at Duke, instead. And so began the most formal part of his apprenticeship.
‘Where he should be’
Scheyer is not one who believes in “everything happens for a reason,” he said.
“But I do think there are certain moments, as I reflect on my life or reading other people’s stories, or hearing about them, that there’s critical moments where you have to pivot, or you have to get back up. And for me that was that moment,” he said of his injury. “And I got back up right away.”
Come Monday night, most of the people closest to Scheyer will be at Cameron Indoor Stadium for his first game as head coach. His parents. Some of his closest friends. Kelly is coming in from New York, where he works in finance. Wallis is coming in from Indiana, where he works at Notre Dame. When Scheyer got the job, he FaceTimed those two, among others. Kelly, whose role in Scheyer’s circle is to keep him grounded, playfully told him not to mess it up, in so many words.
The reaction to their childhood and lifelong buddy following Coach K and becoming the head coach at Duke, at 34, “wavers between being like, this is a totally natural organic evolution of where he should be in life and what he’s capable of and what he’s made for, kind of juxtaposed with this, like, holy (expletive),” Kelly said.
Nute, who’s back home and now coaching middle-schoolers, isn’t all that surprised. He went from trying to “punk” Scheyer, in Scheyer’s words, to a longtime friend. Nute could tell stories about how the Scheyers flew him down to Durham to see a Duke game once, how Scheyer FaceTimed Nute the day before his wedding seven years ago to offer his congratulations.
Nute was born on the South Side, into unfavorable circumstances, and before the Scheyers “I really hadn’t hung out with many white people,” he said. “They treated me like I was one of their sons.”
In a way, that sixth-grade FAAM experience provided Scheyer with his first test in building team chemistry. Those who didn’t think he belonged soon learned. He won over his skeptics. Now comes the start of his greatest challenge yet.
