Duke Basketball Manager Position Draws More Than 150 Applicants

By: Neil Offen
The Herald Sun
9/11/09

 DURHAM- The job ad is for a position that sometimes requires more than 40 hours per week, lots of sweat and pays...well, nothing.

So far, there have been more than 150 applicants for the position.

It might help that the job also gets you really good seats for Duke men's basketball games.

The ad - which has been running for the last couple weeks in the Duke University student newspaper- is for student managers for the Duke men's basketball team.

Despite the fact that one might think it's easy to fill the coveted slots, the Duke athletic department advertises for student managers each fall. "We do it to give everyone a chance at it," said Chris Spatola, director of basketball operations. "We get a lot of kids who've said they want to do it, but tell us they never knew the process, or didn't know we took the general student population as applicants."

Some of the students who apply do it because, well those seats are good, and you don't have to camp out in Krzyzewskiville, and you get to meet Coach K and hang with the players and...

"If their primary motivation is to get good seats, they really don't have a full understanding of what we do," said Eric Skeffington, the lone senior manager this year for the team. "When they hear the scope of what we do, the commitment that you have to make, they may not want to pursue it anymore through the whole process."

That process is demanding.

The applicants-last year were 215 freshman and sophomores, about 4 percent of the eligible student population- vie for two to four spots. They all fill out an application, submit extensive resumes, go through a series of meetings and then sit through an interview with the current managers.

"At each stage, we'll cut down the number of applicants," Spatola said. "We'll present what being a manager is really like and what we're looking for and see if there are telltale signs if this is really for them."

If they've applied for the good seats or to meet Coach K, "you can tell right away, this isn't going to be for them," Spatola said.

 The interviewer's want to know if the applicants are willing to work very hard, willing to make a big time commitment and whether they are good students. "With the time commitment involved, if you want to do this, you have to really be on top of your game academically," Spatola said. "You're not going to have much extra time to study."

Spatola knows all about hard work and time commitments-and he already knows Coach K, who happens to be his father-in-law. Spatola is a U.S. Military Academy graduate and former basketball player who served five years in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of captain and serving in Iraq.

And his first job after getting out of the Army was a graduate assistant / head team manager for the Blue Devils in 2007-2008.

Among much else, the manager's job includes rebounding for players, keeping charts, cleaning up, occasionally participating in drills and more. Skeffington has been a manager for three years now. He calls the job-which last practically the entire academic year, far longer than the basketball season itself- "probably the most unique experience you can have at Duke."