More About Coach K Coaching His Grandson

You get the feeling that he’s going to have fun with this

Here’s another article about Coach K coaching his grandson, Michael Savarino, a first for the father of three daughters who never had the chance to coach a son (and might not have wanted to for all we know).

It’s a lot of the same stuff as before but there are more quotes including some insights into how the team is managed on a daily basis. Take this for instance:

“He’s really a good kid. A tough kid. We do a lot of testing during the summer—medically to make sure we’re good. Then we do—a couple times a year—combine testing like the NBA does. One of the things is the 185 bench press—how many times you can do that.”

“Maybe it says something about the strength of our team, but he did the most. He did 10 of them. Now, guys do more.”

“We do a bunch of things every practice. We measure everything—workload, sprinting speed, distances. We have this Catapault system where I get a report every day. So last week, they played. Tre (Jones) just had an amazing day. He was off the charts in speed. Then I looked at Wendell (Moore). He was off the charts too. He played with Tre. Then I looked at Javin’s (DeLaurier), and he was off the chart.”

“So the next day, Wendell again was up there. I showed it to Mickie (Krzyzewski). I said, ‘Look, Wendell is developing the habit of playing faster.’ So she’s looking at it, and it has all the guys listed. And she says, ‘Where’s Michael?’ Well, he didn’t play. He’s a walk-on.”

He went on to make a joke about how “the mother” hasn’t pressured him so far but he’s sort of expecting it.

The mother in this case is his eldest daughter, Debbie, who has been around Duke basketball long enough to coach Michael herself. He’ll probably hear less from the mother than the grandmother.