Coach K’s plan for his life after coaching has been decades in the making
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Coach K’s Next Job
By next spring, Mike Krzyzewski will make the full transition out of coaching when Jon Scheyer takes over the Duke program. Coach K will have plenty to do at Duke even after his coaching days end. Krzyzewski is under contract to work as an ambassador for the school. How has Coach K reached this point in his career, and what’s next? This is The N&O’s special report.
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Mike Krzyzewski spent the first part of a Tuesday last month talking Duke basketball with reporters at the ACC’s Tip Off event in an uptown Charlotte hotel.
The main topic of the day was his impending retirement and how he’s preparing his 42nd and final Blue Devils team for the new season.
That afternoon, he headed back to Durham and, a little after 4 p.m., sauntered into Durham Academy’s Moylan Field to meet up with his wife, Mickie, and other family members.
Game planning and practice review took a back seat as he focused on Emmie Savarino, his 17-year-old granddaughter who was playing in the final home game of her Durham Academy field hockey career.
With that, he transformed from Hall of Fame coach to, as his 10 grandchildren refer to him, Poppy.
“The grandparent thing is part of it,” Krzyzewski said, during an exclusive interview with the News & Observer, about his decision to retire from coaching.
By next spring, Krzyzewski will make the full transition out of coaching when Jon Scheyer takes over the Duke program, allowing a then-75-year-old Krzyzewski to stop devoting countless hours to the game as he has over the last 42 years while turning Duke into one of the nation’s elite basketball programs.
“He was at tons of my basketball games when I was a kid,” said Jamie Spatola, Krzyzewski’s youngest daughter and the one of his three children who took up the sport that has made his name famous. “He’s always done that.”
But now there will be more time for it, which Krzyzewski is ready to embrace while at the same time promising not to overdo it and funnel his competitive fire through them.
“Well, I won’t be a helicopter grandparent, getting on the coach’s ass,” Krzyzewski said during an exclusive interview with the News & Observer. “But just to show interest.”
That goes for no matter what extracurricular activity his grandchildren pick, be it Emmie’s field hockey or 11-year-old John David Spatola’s ninja warrior competitions or, yes, the basketball that 12-year-old Rem Frasher already plays so well.
“But also if they would be involved in theater or whatever,” Krzyzewski said. “You want to show an interest. Not just show an interest, you are. I am interested in them. We are lucky to have 10 grandkids.”
The Krzyzewskis keep up even when they can’t physically be present. Mickie honed her IT skills finding live streams allowing her and her husband to watch from home.
So even when Emmie’s sister, Carly, plays a volleyball match for Saint Mary’s School in Raleigh, her grandparents are watching.
“Sometimes this tech work is a tedious process but they do it,” said Debbie Savarino, Carly and Emmie’s mother and the oldest Krzyzewski daughter. “Two 75-year-olds figuring out the tech stuff to watch their grands. The best.”
The long road to retirement
In many ways over the decades as Krzyzewski’s family grew in Durham, he and Mickie have prepared themselves for the time that will arrive next spring, when it’s time to step away from coaching.
Their West Cornwallis Road home, just across the Orange County line, abuts Duke Forest. They have a pool, basketball court and bocce ball court.
Lindy Frasher, his middle daughter, lives less than a mile away with her husband, Steve, and their three children. Peter and Debbie Savarino and their family live around 4 miles away. Jamie Spatola, her husband Chris and their three children are 6 miles away.
None live more than 15 minutes away from their parent’s home, a fact that Krzyzewski treasures.
“All 10 of my grandchildren are here, in the area,” Krzyzewski said. “They come over to swim all the time. So that’s been a cool thing.”
He paused for a second, realizing how normal it’s become for families to spread and scatter all over the country and thus appreciating his situation even more.
“Really? In this day and age?” Krzyzewski said. “That doesn’t happen.”
He and Mickie have their favorite vacation spots, like Las Vegas where they escaped last April between the end of the basketball season and his retirement plan announcement. Or heading to Napa Valley, California, where they headline an annual V Foundation for Cancer Research fundraiser.
He’ll take time to enjoy more of those trips, which he could only sample while coaching Division I basketball at Army West Point and Duke continuously since 1975.
Staying put on campus
That said, he will have plenty to do at Duke after his coaching days end. He’s under contract to work as an ambassador for the school, a position in which Duke president Vince Price said Krzyzewski will be “an advisor and counselor to me and to my colleagues across campus and beyond.”
“The thing about retiring,” Krzyzewski said, “we are involved with so many things. I’m going to stay in this office. We’re on the sixth floor. We have this (Duke basketball) Legacy Fund that we’re running. I’ll be involved, just like I am now, in so many aspects of the university. Probably a little bit more, although we are pretty involved.”
An adjunct professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business for the last two decades, he’ll continue to work with students there in addition to speaking to students around the campus in other disciplines.
“We are going to be a part of Duke’s continuing journey, like President Price said, for as long as we are around,” Krzyzewski said.
For years he’s given speeches around the country through the Washington Speakers Bureau, where his booking fees are more than $70,000.
Out of the spotlight, he makes calls or prepares hand-written notes to people fighting cancer or other life-threatening diseases, usually complete strangers.
He’ll continue to host his SiriusXM radio show, which airs weekly during the fall and winter. It’s called Basketball and Beyond with Coach K and, perhaps, it will involve more of the beyond topics starting next year.
“In the future, they’ve talked about maybe doing something different,” Krzyzewski said. “I’ve really enjoyed that show. I’ve gotten to meet so many people. And people want to be on. So that’s good.”
Helping shape college basketball, NCAA
But basketball, the sport that took him from his inner-city Chicago neighborhood to West Point for what he calls the education that changed his life to now being among the most accomplished, famous and wealthy people in his profession, will still be part of his life in one way or another.
“I’ll probably get involved in some way with basketball,” he said, “but maybe at the NBA level, if I could, with consulting or something. You never know.”
Jamie Spatola has one particular task for her dad to tackle.
“Part of me wants him to help figure out college basketball,” Spatola said. “In some ways, it feels like it would take someone with that universal authority to be able to have an impact.”
Krzyzewski doesn’t hide his frustration with how the NCAA manages basketball. He’s often said the sport needs a czar while quickly saying he doesn’t want the job.
“People have been saying I’ve been vying to run the NCAA,” he said. “No way. No way. I’ve tried to do it behind the scenes for 40 years. For 40 years.”
College football runs its own playoff system separate from the NCAA. That leaves March Madness, the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, as the main source of income for the organization.
This month, a virtual constitutional convention will take place aimed at massively overhauling the NCAA’s structure. The NCAA Board of Governors will consider proposals from the constitutional committee in December and voting on a new structure could take place in January.
Krzyzewski’s problem is with all these meetings, where changes and improvements are discussed behind closed doors and too often no progress is made. That’s allowed a system to perpetuate that, at its best, hasn’t always been fair to all people and, at its worst, has been more sinister, Krzyzewski said.
“Always some nameless committee where you can say anything you want and you are not held accountable,” Krzyzewski said. “There are different agendas in that meeting and I don’t want to get into it. But all I know is our sport is primarily black. A lot of stoppages along the years have been because of that. I believe that. And by the way, a lot of African American coaches believe that.”
Because Krzyzewski said such things while coaching Duke, the natural conclusion many drew is he was doing it to somehow help the Blue Devils win more games.
Like last December, before the COVID-19 vaccines were available and cases and deaths were spiking, when Krzyzewski raised the idea of pausing the season for a few weeks until vaccines could be administered. Alabama coach Nate Oats suggested it was only because Duke had already lost home games to Michigan State and Illinois.
“Do you think if Coach K hadn’t lost the two non-conference games at home he’d still be saying that?” Oats said.
Oats later apologized. Still, maybe when Krzyzewski is done coaching, accusations of him being self-serving might might disappear.
But it shouldn’t matter, because as his family and others closest to him say, it has nothing to do with wins and losses.
“This is real,” Jamie Spatola said. “Whatever you think of the value of sport in society — perhaps it shouldn’t hold the esteem that it does — it sure is a place to teach young people and to remind ourselves of certain fundamental values of how to treat people and work together. He means that. He’s not just trying to win games.”
Of course, he has won games — 1,170 of them, more than anyone who’s ever coached college basketball.
Basketball will always be a part of what he’s doing.
“My aunts and mom have literally grown up in basketball, just like me,” said Michael Savarino, Krzyzewski’s second-oldest grandson who is in his third season playing for his grandfather with the Blue Devils. “Obviously, completely different childhoods but their childhoods being completely surrounded by basketball. You eat, sleep and breathe it because of coach.”
Coach K’s treasured family time
But even while building a coaching career in basketball with few, if any peers, Krzyzewski has always been close to his family — maybe closer than they realized.
“He doesn’t have a ton of one-on-one time with each of my children and that’s one thing I hope for more in retirement,” Jamie Spatola said. “But when we are together, he does observe them individually. I’ll find myself being ‘Oh, my dad really doesn’t know my kids well.’ But he will pull me to the side and say something so poignant about one of my kids I’ll be like, `Oh my gosh how does he know that?’ I know that’s his gift. He sees people. He sees people’s gifts. He sees people’s insecurities, people’s pain. And he often knows what to do and he’s always willing to take the time to do it.”
Tuesday night, when Duke opens the season with Kentucky in New York City, Krzyzewski will be back in basketball mode. From now until the end of the season, it will be all about leading this Duke team to its goal of winning championships.
Then, the basketball coaching part of Krzyzewski’s life will be done.
“It’s good,” Krzyzewski said. “I’m happy. I hope you can sense I’m happy. Really looking forward to this year but I’m also looking forward to the future. My cup will runneth over by the end of this year with maybe college basketball. And I’ve had a damn big cup and I’m grateful for it, really. You are lucky.”
This story was originally published November 7, 2021 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Coach K’s plan for his life after coaching has been decades in the making."