Mike Krzyzewski is a retired American college basketball coach. He has coached the men's Duke University Blue Devils basketball team since 1980. He is currently in his twenty-fourth year as head coach. He has won 2 NCAA Championships (2005, 2010), and coached the U.S
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team to two Olympic gold medals (2008, 2012). In 2007 he was named Coach of the Year by the Associated Press and was named Coach of the Year by the NABC and ESPN college basketball writers in 2009 and 2011.
The very first time I ever heard of Mike Krzyzewski was in my freshman year of college. The class had a professor who was a Duke alum and he said that Mike's greatest coaching achievement was bringing Duke to their first national championship in 2001.
I remember thinking, "Wow, that's pretty impressive." After that I didn't think much more about it until I got to be a senior in college and got into coaching myself. Then one day I read an article about how he won his first national championship when he was just thirty years old and that's when it all began to click for me: what a phenomenal accomplishment for someone so young to do something so impressive! I immediately became a huge fan of his and followed him religiously on every level: from high school basketball to the Olympics, and now here we are today, where we can both appreciate what he's accomplished and hopefully continue doing it ourselves!
For me, there is always something about this man that inspires me to go out there every day with passion because I know that passion will get us to where we want to be, whether it's winning an NCAA Championship or having a team that wins games every night!
I've been fortunate enough to have had some great experiences with Coach Krzyzewski along the way: from going to practices at our alma mater, Wake Forest University, where I earned my undergraduate degree in Communication Studies in 2008; going to Duke practices when I was a graduate assistant at Virginia Commonwealth University; going on road trips with him when I was an assistant coach at North Carolina State University from 2009-2012; being invited into his inner circle at Duke when he coached me during my freshman year at Georgetown University from 2012-2013; being invited into his inner circle during his run with USA Basketball from 2013 through 2016; accompanying him on trips around the world for various competitions throughout my career so far; being hired as an assistant coach at Duke when he took over for Mike Krzy