Duke’s ‘Brotherhood’ is helping HBCU coaches find success on the court

At Duke, they call it the Brotherhood — a bond built on familial bonds, blood, championships, mentorship and expectations shared among former Duke basketball players.

For Howard men’s basketball head coach Kenneth “Kenny” Blakeney and Tennessee State head coach Nolan Smith, lessons learned at Cameron Indoor Stadium prepared them for their head coaching careers.

The former Blue Devils are now carrying that culture into HBCU basketball, not only winning games but making history by taking their programs to heights not reached in decades, ending conference tournament championship droughts and earning groundbreaking NCAA tournament bids.

This year’s NCAA men’s tournament will be the first since 1994 with three HBCU teams in the field, with Prairie View A&M joining Tennessee State and Howard.

That two of them are led by Duke alums is not taken lightly by Blakeney and Smith.

“It’s just a great sense of pride as a Duke man and an HBCU man,” Smith said. “We’re here representing our culture, doing it for our people, while also being Duke men at that.”

Smith, 37, always knew he wanted coaching to be in his future.

Even when he was helping Duke win the 2010 national championship and earning All-America honors in his senior season the following year, he paid close attention to the program’s leadership and foundation.

After a four-season professional career that included 84 games with the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, Smith joined Duke coach Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski’s staff in 2016, eventually made stops at Louisville and Memphis and, in July of last year, achieved his dream of becoming a head coach when Tennessee State hired him.

When he got the job, he leaned on Blakeney and Duke alum Tyler Thornton, a former Bison assistant coach. They helped build Howard into a model for success.

“[Tennessee State] was the first school to take a chance on me, give me the head coaching opportunity. It meant everything,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, being a young, Black head coach, it’s not easy to get a job. No matter where you played, whether you played in the NBA or whatever. It’s not easy to get a head coaching job. It’s really been a big-time job for me to just be sitting in this seat here. …

“It means everything. It means everything, representing all HBCUs [and] representing Tennessee State for these kids.”

One central lesson he took from playing at Duke is the importance of leading with positivity and confidence, Smith said. Thus, he is intentional about instilling confidence in his team, believing a player’s self-belief can transform how they perform and compete. He encourages his staff to do the same, so no one feels uncertain about their abilities.

“I want my guys feeling like they’re invincible. I want them to feel like can’t nobody mess with them. Like, can’t nobody touch them,” Smith said. “They can guard anybody. If you put the best player in the world in front of my players, I want my guys just to have all the confidence in the world that they can stop them when they step between them lines.”

Smith said his goal as a head coach is to give his players a blueprint for what it truly means to be a champion.

“For me, I’ve won a championship. I’ve been a national champion. I’ve been a 21st pick taken in a [NBA] draft, I’ve done everything with this game. [I tell them], ‘Why do I want to win? I want to win because I want to help you. I want to help y’all be successful,’” Smith said. “When you win in basketball and you win on the court, it typically helps you win in life. So just helping them understand why I’m here — why I do what I do. I do it all for them.”

But the Tigers’ program he inherited before this season didn’t come with much of a championship pedigree. Its last conference title was in 1994. Still, Smith believed that if he focused on how players prepare every day rather than wins or losses, he could turn things around.

It didn’t take long for the Duke-informed philosophy to pay off.

Smith led the Tigers to a 23-9 overall record and a 15-5 mark in Ohio Valley Conference play, earning a share of the regular-season conference title in his first year. Before the OVC tournament championship game on March 7, Smith admitted he felt the nerves building as he waited for tipoff, so he reached out to Krzyzewski.

The response was simple, familiar and effective.

“He texts back, ‘Be you.’ Right away, I calmed down, and I was just ready to go,” Smith said. “Coach K always told all of us as players to follow your instincts and be you — especially once you got to that point where you earned that freedom from Coach K. …Those were the best words. Same [advice] he told Jayson Tatum, RJ [Barrett],and Zion [Williamson].”

With Smith’s mind at ease, Tennessee State won its first conference championship since 1994 and earned the highest seed of the trio of HBCUs in the tournament. The No. 15-seed Tigers will play No. 2 Iowa State (27-7, 12-6 Big 12) in the first round Friday.

Blakeney’s path to his first head coaching role was far lengthier and more winding than Smith’s.

Blakeney, who described playing for Duke under Coach K as akin to attending a leadership academy, spent more than two decades as a Division I assistant coach. He coached at seven schools across five conferences, including stints in the Big East, Atlantic 10 and Ivy League.

But he struggled to find a school willing to hand him the keys to a program.

“I got turned down by D-II [schools]. I got turned down by D-III [schools],” Blakeney said Saturday.

Finally, in 2019, Howard gave him a chance.

Using an emphasis on accountability, responsibility and preparation — values he said he learned at Duke — Blakeney has executed a dramatic turnaround in Washington, D.C., winning three MEAC tournament championships in the past four years at a program that hadn’t previously been to the NCAA tournament since 1992.

“HBCUs gave us that opportunity, and we’re so grateful that they did,” Blakeney said after winning Saturday’s MEAC title game, securing a ticket to the Big Dance for the Bison (23-10, 11-3 MEAC). “[Howard athletic director Kery] Davis took chance on me when other universities would not.”

Blakeney, 54, was on back-to-back national championship teams with the Blue Devils in 1991 and 1992. Howard’s coaching staff’s ties to Duke mean there’s more national championship experience sitting next to Blakeney on the bench.

Howard assistant coach Nate James, a national champion as a player on the 2001 Duke team led by Jay Williams and Shane Battier, was also an assistant coach on the 2010 and 2015 national champion Blue Devils teams.

The 48-year-old former Austin Peay head coach says Blakeney uses the same championship standards at Howard that they learned at Duke.

“Obviously we’re winners, we’re champions, and we want these guys here at Howard and Tennessee State to be champions as well,” James said. “But as we talk about basketball, we want them to win. We want them to have their moments be seen and all the hard work they put into it, because they represent something bigger than themselves. When we played at Duke, we represented something bigger than ourselves.”

Blakeney said he considers it a point of pride to represent HBCUs on a national stage when the No. 16-seed Bison play No. 16-seed University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in the First Four of the NCAA tournament in Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday.

“We want to be the smartest basketball team on the court, but we also want to be the toughest team on the court,” Blakeney said. “If we can be the smartest and the toughest basketball team, we know we’re positioning ourselves for an opportunity to win those games.

“I think that’s what I want the viewer to take away is that they’re seeing intelligent Black young men play at a high level and doing it at an HBCU — representing an HBCU that has a great tradition, great culture and great legacy.”

Thornton, 33, who spent six years coaching under Blakeney at Howard — helping to secure two NCAA tournament appearances in recent years — returned to his alma mater as an assistant coach at Duke this season.

He credits his time with the Bison for preparing him to help the Blue Devils’ program, saying Howard gave him the opportunity to learn what it takes to build a program without the same luxuries and resources of Duke or most Power Four programs.

“I do eventually want to be a head coach and want to run my own program, so when I was working for Kenny, he gave me a lot of access to his day-to-day,” Thornton said. “He let me sit in on meetings, and was really transparent about the process of what he was thinking and what he was doing in terms of building the program. That’s what I brought back here.” 

This year’s Blue Devils (32-2, 17-1 ACC) are a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament and will face No. 16 Siena in the first round Thursday. Given his numerous NCAA tournament appearances as a player, graduate assistant and assistant coach, Thornton is advising Duke’s young core, headlined by underclassmen Cameron Boozer and Isaiah Evans, on how to prepare and advance. 

“What we’ve done up to this point has been really good, and at this time of the year, everybody’s attention to detail and commitment has to turn up a notch, so our guys are ready,” he said. “We’re not going to change from what we’ve done throughout the year till now, just keeping these guys focused on what’s right in front of them and not trying to look too far ahead.”

Thornton remains connected to both Smith and Blakeney, showing the Brotherhood has tightened and deepened as some of its members have crossed paths at HBCUs.

“Kenny is doing great at Howard, and he would do great at a Power Four-level school,” Thornton said. “Nolan, to be able to do what he did in such a short period of time, [it] is only a small amount of time before he’s running a bigger program.

“The impact those guys are having where they are, it just speaks to who they are as men and just the foundation that we all got while we were here at Duke.”

Now, Smith and Blakeney are using that foundation to build programs of their own at HBCUs, bucking stereotypes about the Duke program’s culture that date back decades.

“With the things that we’ve all heard growing up about Duke men and Duke basketball players,” Smith said. “Jalen Rose, what he used to say about Duke basketball players, right? We’ve all heard it. We’ve all seen it.”

Rose, who played in college at Michigan in the early 1990s and later professionally in the NBA, was critical of Duke basketball in the 2011 ESPN documentary “The Fab Five.” In the documentary, Rose said Duke tended to recruit Black players from privileged backgrounds, or players who didn’t fit the image of the “inner-city” player.

“Well, we’re not what they say we are, clearly. Two of us are coaching at HBCUs, so yeah, I think that makes us very different.”

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