Duke Basketball Is On A Roll

Call it the Duke Double.

Last year the Duke women’s and men’s basketball teams won their respective ACC Tournament championships. That was the second straight year both Duke teams emerged as ACC champs. Each finished atop the regular season standings, too, for the second straight time.

Advertisement

But that’s not the entire story. The ’26 season marked the seventh time since 2001 that both Blue Devil squads ran the table.

This double-barreled performance is far more unusual than is generally recognized – or even noticed.

The Duke men won their first ACC Tournament, the new league’s seventh, in 1960 under rookie head coach Vic Bubas. Overall the Devils have won 24 titles in 72 tries (.333), one year in three, discounting the Covid-truncated 2020 ACC Tournament. The women’s program didn’t reach the league tournament final until 1995, 17 years after the event was first played, and didn’t win it all until 2000.

The inaugural women’s ACC Tournament was staged in 1978 at Virginia’s University Hall five years after league bylaws were changed to permit grants in aid to female athletes. Title IX more or less forced the old boys running athletic departments to accommodate women, whose teams got minimal support early on.

Advertisement

Those with aspirational athletic directors, like Maryland’s Jim Kehoe, North Carolina’s Homer Rice, and NC State’s Willis Casey, invested enough to push to the head of the ACC pack.

Meanwhile Duke AD Tom Butters, forever lauded for his steadfast support for struggling men’s coach Mike Krzyzewski in the early eighties, was the stingiest of the ACC lot when it came to what he dismissed as the “girls” team and their coach, Debbie Leonard, lowest paid in the league.

Even a strongly supported women’s program like Maryland had to scrape by. Terp coach Chris Weller recalled having to chauffuer her team to away games in an activity bus, and fed players homemade peanut butter and jelly or bologna and cheese sandwiches. Weller’s Terps won that inaugural title, topping Kay Yow’s NC State squad, and five of the first six.

It would be 22 years before the hamstrung Duke women won their first league tournament.

Advertisement

These days athletic investments are munificent throughout much of the conference. Yet since the turn of the century only six schools won both men’s and women’s ACC Tournaments, and just three won both in the same season. Duke alone had done it five times.

By winning both versions of the league tournament in 2026, the Blue Devils matched Coach K-era repeats achieved in 2010 and 2011 under Joanne P. McCallie, and before that from 2001 through 2003 under Gail Goestenkors.

Coach G. took Duke’s women to their only Final Fours to date – in 1999, 2002, 2003, and 2006. She will long be remembered for her facetiously suggestive comment to conclude a pre-NCAA press briefing to a corps of all-male media members: “I hope it was as good for you as it was for me.”

As for McCallie, she never got her due from fans. She became the women’s coach fastest to reach 100 wins at a program, at least according to Wikipedia; prior to coming to Durham was named 2005 AP national women’s coach of the year at Michigan State; and took Duke to eight straight NCAA tournaments and four consecutive Elite Eights from 2010 through 2013. Her Blue Devils won better than three-quarters of their games from 2008 through 2020.

Advertisement

The Blue Devil women won the league tournament nine times in this century, fifty percent more than the nearest competitor, Notre Dame, an established national power that joined the league in 2014.

North Carolina similarly repeated as champs in 2007 and 2008 under Sylvia Hatchell (1987-2019), whose roughhewn manner eventually hastened her departure.

Notre Dame ran the table, or tables, in 2015, part of an ACC coming-out for the Irish women. They won five of the first six ACC Tournaments in which they competed under Muffet McGraw, a four-time national Coach of The Year and two-time NCAA titlist in 2001 and 2018.

That’s the entire roster of modern double achievers. Ten times in the past 26 years an ACC program provided the men’s and women’s league champs in the same season (38.5 percent of the time). Seven of those 10 double triumphs were achieved by Duke teams.

Advertisement

Back in the 20th century, both a school’s men and women captured the league title in the same season only four times (17.4 percent). That included Duke in 2000.

This season will mark the 50th edition of the ACC women’s tournament. As the women’s game gains attention and competitive strength, simultaneously winning titles on both sides of the ledger should be recognized more widely as a feat to celebrate.

Go to the DBR Boards to find Blue Healer Auctions || Drop us a line