Kevin Gorman: Duquesne's season serves as reminder that there's no place like home
The final stop of the season the Duquesne Dukes call their Tour of Pittsburgh was at the only home venue that didn’t require them to go through a tunnel or cross a bridge.
Just Forbes and Fifth avenues.
A seasonlong renovation of UPMC Chuck Cooper Fieldhouse, which will replace Palumbo Center on campus, has turned Duquesne into college basketball’s nomads.
Duquesne played its home games at LaRoche in the North Hills, Robert Morris’ UPMC Events Center at People’s Court in Moon and PPG Paints Arena in Uptown.
If this season sounds dizzying, wrap your brain around this: The Dukes recorded their first 20-win campaign since 2009 and third in 48 years, winning 10 of 14 home games after Friday’s 73-62 Atlantic 10 loss to Richmond in the regular-season finale.
“We’re going to keep on running around town until we get our own (arena),” Duquesne junior forward Michael Hughes said after practice Thursday on the fourth floor of Power Center, where a racquetball court was converted into a locker room. “We’ve got to make it work. Why not have some fun with it?”
It’s been a fun and unbelievable season, and not just because of the neutral-site storyline. We’re talking about Duquesne basketball, once one of the most maligned programs in the country. What Keith Dambrot and his Dukes have done under the circumstances should have the city’s basketball fans following with a fervor.
Instead, with Duquesne students on spring break, 19,000-seat PPG Paints Arena was mostly empty with black curtains covering the upper deck. A season in the shadows has been the toughest pill to swallow for the Dukes. I’m almost waiting for Dambrot to put on a pair of ruby-red slippers and click his heels three times.
“I’ll tell you what’s really hard for our group,” Dambrot said. “They like to play in front of people, so going to LaRoche or Robert Morris has been better than PPG Paints Arena because it’s so big. When you say, ‘Is it good or bad?’ I’m not sure. … It’s hard. We’ve played better in better environments.”
Now that Dambrot has turned Duquesne into a winner — and the Dukes received votes in the AP poll in December after a 10-0 start, their first since February 2011 — his next challenge is to cultivate a fan base of believers.
Dambrot understands the revolving door of coaches and players and the continuous losing was draining to Duquesne fans, many of whom have gone gray while waiting for a winner.
“That’s probably the next step here at Duquesne that we have to improve,” Dambrot said. “We’ll never be as good as we should be until we improve our fan base. And I’m not blaming them because I wouldn’t come, either. I’ve had guys come up to me and say, ‘I had season tickets for 35 years, but I couldn’t do it anymore.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t blame you.’ If you don’t get a reward, if you don’t get an NCAA Tournament bid, why should you come?”
Well, you should come back because Duquesne finally invested in its basketball program on a Division I level, from hiring Dambrot away from Akron to building the Cooper Fieldhouse to recruiting a competitive team to showcase.
Six Dukes have scored 20 points or more in a game this season, including 1,000-point scorer Marcus Weathers, a 6-foot-5 junior forward who averages 14.4 points. They have size in 6-foot-11 graduate transfer Baylee Steele and Hughes, who averages 10 points, seven rebounds and nearly three blocked. And they have a talented backcourt in 5-8 junior Tavian Dunn-Martin, 6-1 sophomore Sincere Carry and 6-5 freshman Maceo Austin that combines for 30 points a game.
“We’re pretty good. Now, we have to ratchet it up another level and believe that we’re good,” Dambrot said. “Around here, our own people — people that have been here a long time — they don’t know whether it’s a flash in the pan. They’re just waiting for us to flop again. But it’s fun because of that in some ways. I’ve embraced it.”
Yet Dambrot made waves when he dismissed the significance of reaching the 20-win milestone. The first problem for Dambrot is he knows Duquesne’s history. His father, Sid, was a senior guard on the 1953-54 Dukes that won their first 22 games, ascended to a No. 1 national ranking and reached the NIT final before losing to Holy Cross.
The second problem is he wonders how many wins is enough to get Duquesne a postseason invitation. The only chance for the Dukes to earn an NCAA tourney berth is to win the A-10 Tournament championship. But, in 2007, Dambrot’s 26-win Akron Zips didn’t even receive an NIT invite.
Dambrot believes Duquesne would have won two more home games if they were playing on campus, in front of a friendly crowd. He also believes Duquesne can win the A-10 Tournament, even if he’s the only one.
“If you look at what we’ve done and the fact that we didn’t have any home games, we should be on the bubble for the NCAA Tournament,” Dambrot said. “Even now, nobody really thinks we’re any good. You watch the A-10 games on TV and they go through the standings and they’ll talk about every one of those top six, seven or eight teams but us. You never hear Duquesne.”
That’s all the motivation Dambrot needs to cross the bridge on the final stop of this tour. He can see the light at the end of the tunnel, hoping Cooper Fieldhouse is ready in time for the Dukes to have a place to call home.
“I hope so,” Dambrot said, “I don’t know if I can go through another year like this.”
Click. Click. Click.
Kevin Gorman is a TribLive reporter covering the Pirates. A Baldwin native and Penn State graduate, he joined the Trib in 1999 and has covered high school sports, Pitt football and basketball and was a sports columnist for 10 years. He can be reached at kgorman@triblive.com.
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