‘He has just always loved a challenge.’ How Jon Scheyer prepared his whole life for the pressure — and privilege — of succeeding Coach K at Duke.
DURHAM, N.C. — The photos popped into the family WhatsApp thread on a Wednesday evening this summer, a strategically timed greeting from Jon Scheyer to his parents, two older sisters and two brothers-in-law.
For more than a decade, July 13 had been a somber anniversary for the family, a reminder of the freak 2010 accident that derailed Scheyer’s grandest basketball dream, interrupting his playing career and sending him down a path of pain, frustration and ultimately self-exploration.
That crash was represented in the first photo Jon sent, the one capturing him in a heap on the sideline at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas a moment after Golden State Warriors wing Joe Ingles poked his right eye with such force and at such an ill-fated angle that Scheyer’s eyelid was cut, his retina torn and his optic nerve significantly damaged.
In that moment, as an undrafted rookie playing for the Miami Heat in the NBA Summer League, Scheyer couldn’t comprehend the career detour he had just encountered. He began that day as a recently crowned national champion at Duke and a confident shooting guard determined to win a roster spot alongside LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.
“I was going to stick,” Scheyer says. “I promise you. I was going to make that team.”
Before he knew it, Scheyer was instead in a trauma hospital in Nevada with his right eye swollen, full of blood and blinded and his NBA aspirations suspended. To this day, that summer league snapshot elicits a certain level of grief for the whole family.
But in that same post this summer, Scheyer also provided an uplifting picture, a grinning selfie from his fifth-floor office inside the Schwartz-Butters Athletic Center at Duke. Twelve years to the day after suffering that gruesome eye injury, Scheyer reminded his family that everything, as usual, had turned out OK.
His smile was now that of a proud and determined 34-year-old attacking another day as the new king on the Duke basketball throne, the successor to the legendary Mike Krzyzewski as the Blue Devils head coach.
Here Scheyer was now with his limitless energy, a clear vision for the future and an opportunity no one in the family could have dreamed of.
Call it fate or destiny if you’d like. More accurately, this was simply the latest grand payoff for Scheyer’s immeasurable audacity.
“When you set big goals, you have to go for it,” he says. “I just don’t know any happy medium. You have to go for it. Like this opportunity now? I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Are you kidding me?”
To many inside the college basketball world, what Scheyer is attempting in replacing Coach K and pushing to uphold the prestige of Duke basketball is the equivalent of trying to cross the Grand Canyon on a piece of tight dental floss.
He is following a sports icon, the owner of a Division I men’s record 1,202 victories plus 13 Final Four appearances and five national championships. And he is doing so with a program that is at once one of the country’s most admired and respected but also one of the most despised and scrutinized. The outside pressure already has built.
“I get it,” Scheyer says. “You’re never supposed to be the guy who replaces the guy.”
Krzyzewski, though, sees this situation differently, certain Scheyer has every qualification needed to experience a long run of success. Everything in Scheyer’s playing and coaching background points in that direction.
“This,” Krzyzewski says, “is what he’s supposed to do. That’s the very first thing.
“When I recruited Jon, you saw it immediately: He was a natural. The game came so easy to him. There wasn’t really one thing that he did great. He just was great. And you saw that from the beginning.”
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Five national championship banners hang from the rafters at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Two, Krzyzewski points out, have Scheyer’s fingerprints — from 2010 as a player and 2015 as an assistant coach.
Scheyer knows his climb — from the youth ranks in Chicago’s northern suburbs to the pros to the coaching world — has given him invaluable insight into the secrets of team building and the ideal methods for pursuing success. He also never has felt more confident in his ability to excel, reassured by the preparation he put in over the past decade to set himself up for coaching success.
“That doesn’t mean I’m not nervous,” Scheyer says. “It doesn’t mean I’m not afraid of certain things. Of course I am. But I have always been wired to take the most challenging route. And this, obviously, is going to be a challenging route.”
On Tuesday, after early season home victories over Jacksonville and South Carolina Upstate, Scheyer will bring his seventh-ranked Blue Devils to Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis to face No. 5 Kansas in the State Farm Champions Classic. This will be the first big-stage, bright-lights game of Scheyer’s head coaching tenure.
More importantly for an unproven coach leading a young Blue Devils team with grand aspirations for this season, this is another growth opportunity, a moment to be attacked with enthusiasm and ambition.
That’s the only approach Scheyer knows and the attitude he plans to take into every day as Duke’s coach.
“Jon is just fearless,” his mom, Laury, says. “He is. I don’t know any other way to explain it. He has just always loved a challenge.”
At a bare minimum, Scheyer’s family knows Jon is walking onto the big stage the way he always has, with eagerness and positive energy. He is fully aware of the intense pressure but truly enjoys the stakes, appreciates the grind and is excited to chase his next big basketball conquest.
“I want high-level pressure,” Scheyer says. “I love that. Because
