The Duke Blue Devils basketball team likes to take a team bonding, fall trip, as they visited Ft. Bragg last year. According to the Raleigh News & Observer’s Laura Keeley, the Duke basketball team will be traveling to New York for this year’s team bonding experience that will hopefully be as successful as last year’s. Duke heads on this four-day journey today, and the name they have come up with his voyage to the Big Apple is “Duke Elevate”.
Here’s what Duke assistant coach and former player Steve Wojciechowski had to say about the trip, “We’ll practice each day. We want to develop our team, and we want to develop our guys. We try to do that on the court, and we also try to do that off the court and exposing them to different experiences, hoping they can learn from whether it’s the people up at West Point or gaining a greater perspective by visiting the 9/11 memorial, just being together on the road. All of those things go into us growing together as a group, getting to know one another better and educating ourselves on what we need to do to be successful as a team.”
It sounds like the trip is going to be a whole lot of fun for Duke players, and they will be meeting with a few notable Duke alumni, with Grant Hill and Billy King being the two most important from a basketball perspective. It will be interesting to see if they can come together over the trip, and it will also be interesting to see what kind of “greater perspective” the players are able to gain as a result of this trip.
Duke has more freshmen and sophomores (nine) than juniors and seniors (five), and three of their four freshmen (the other is a walk-on) will have significant roles on the team. Jabari Parker is set to be the star of this team, so this trip will certainly help him develop a greater bond with his teammates; the same can be said for fellow impact freshmen Semi Ojeleye and Matt Jones.