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Ramona Shelburne
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Elizabeth Merrill
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ESPN Senior Writer- Elizabeth Merrill is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. She previously wrote for The Kansas City Star and The Omaha World-Herald.
JON SCHEYER HAS done enough recruiting to know how ridiculous this story sounds, but he swears every word of it is true.
It was 2013. Scheyer was 25 years old and just getting started as a special assistant at Duke. One weekend in July, with Mike Krzyzewski off coaching Team USA, Scheyer was dispatched to an AAU tournament outside Chicago to watch a player they’d offered a scholarship to the week before, a sharpshooter named Luke Kennard.
Scheyer’s job, essentially, was to show up and make sure Kennard saw him in the stands. But as a wide-eyed novice on his first road trip, Scheyer couldn’t help but take a look around.
That’s when he saw Jayson Tatum.
“I’ll never forget it,” says Scheyer, who became Duke’s head coach this spring after Krzyzewski retired. “All the courts were right next to each other. Luke was on Court 3. So as I’m walking into the gym, the games are going on beforehand, and on Court 1, I’m walking through and I stop and I look, and I see this skinny 6-7 kid, who has the biggest baby face you’ve ever seen, just dominating. …
“From that point on, it was my mission. I felt like he belonged [at] Duke.”
Scheyer had enough self-awareness to know he might have been getting a little ahead of himself. Who spots a future NBA superstar 10 minutes into his first recruiting trip? But he did his best to convince Krzyzewski and the…
Source : espn
