When Casey Peters was a student manager for Duke, guard Nolan Smith drew motivation from watching him work.
Managers' duties include wheeling out racks of basketballs, fetching water and Gatorade coolers, rebounding for players and setting up the film room for the players to review tape.
"And when we'd leave the gym, he'd be in there lifting weights, getting shots up, doing whatever it took to become a better basketball player," Smith said. "He always worked so hard. It was something that really inspired me."
Tonight, when No. 4 Duke takes on Clemson in the Blue Devils' senior night home finale (9 p.m., ESPN), Peters won't be working behind the scenes. Peters, who worked his way up from student manager to walk-on player to scholarship player this season, will be honored along with fellow seniors Smith and Kyle Singler.
Anyone who is the least bit interested in college basketball knows about Smith and Singler. The McDonald's All-American recruits helped lead Duke to the NCAA championship as juniors.
Singler was the most outstanding player of the Final Four and ranks fifth in Duke history with 2,271 career points. If Duke wins tonight, Singler will have played in 120 career wins.
Smith is a contender for national player of the year and almost certainly will be a first-team All-American selection.
Peters, meanwhile, has played just 21 career minutes and has yet to score. But in his journey to earn the right to wear a Duke jersey, he had to exercise a level of dedication that impressed his teammates.
Always a fan
Peters' mother Sharon McCloskey, a lawyer and current journalism student at Columbia University, graduated from Duke, so he grew up loving Blue Devils basketball.
When Peters was extremely young, his parents have told him, he was so fascinated with Bobby Hurley, the Duke point guard for Duke's 1991 and 1992 national championship teams, that he called all basketball players "Bobby Hurleys."
After Duke lost one game in the late 1990s when current associate coach Steve Wojciechowski was a player, Peters went outside, sat on his basketball and bawled for an hour on the driveway.
His father Kurt Peters played football and baseball at Columbia, so Casey had natural athletic ability and good athletic training growing up. But he had given up on the idea of playing for Duke by the time he was a senior at Red Bank Regional High in New Jersey.
Yale had offered him a spot on its basketball team, and he was planning to go there when his mother asked him why he didn't consider walking on at Duke.
"I had never really thought about it," Peters said. "But once she suggested it, that's what I wanted to do."
After talking with Mike Schrage, a member of Duke's staff who has since left for Stanford, Peters thought he would have a chance to join the team as a walk-on.
But Duke had 11 scholarship players already plus walk-on Jordan Davidson and didn't need another player. So Peters became a team manager instead.
He was happy, he said, to still be around the program he had loved since he was a small child.
"Yeah, I wanted to be a player, because I'm a player, and I could have played other places," Peters said. "But every day, I learned something new, and being around the program and around Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] was incredible in itself."
Pickup wizard
It's a tradition that the Duke and North Carolina team managers meet in a pickup game on the night before the Blue Devils and Tar Heels play their storied rivalry games.
In Peters' sophomore year, there was a nice crowd at Cameron Indoor Stadium to watch him take an alley-oop pass from fellow manager Joey McMahon and slam the ball through the basket.
When the managers met again later that year in Chapel Hill, manager Pat Thompson kept an unofficial tally of Peters' points. He scored 52.
Those were the highlights of Peters' playing career during his first two seasons in college. But Peters' improvement did not go unnoticed.
"He started as a manager," Krzyzewski said. "[He] did that really well, and through his hard work, although he was a pretty good high school player, turned out to have the strength and the conditioning that would make him a valuable walk-on."
In the summer after Peters' sophomore year, associate head coach Chris Collins met Peters at Duke's basketball office complex and told him he would wear a Blue Devils jersey as a walk-on..
Smith watched as Peters first smiled, and then began to cry.
"It was a culmination of a lot of emotions," Peters said. "I put in a lot of hard work before it happened. It definitely was one of the best feelings I've ever had."
Peters, a 6-foot-4 guard, has played in just 14 games, never for more than five minutes.
But he was holding the ball as the clock expired at the end of Duke's rout of North Carolina at Cameron last season. He stood at the bench and felt Seth Curry grab his arm in a moment of fright as Butler's last-gasp, halfcourt shot hung in the air for what seemed to be an eternity in the NCAA final in Indianapolis last April.
This season, Peters was given a scholarship for his contributions. On a team that has just nine healthy players who were recruited with scholarships, Peters is on the floor during 5-on-5 situations at practice.
He isn't sure what he's doing after this season. During a basketball camp last summer, two German coaches asked him if he had thought about playing overseas.
Peters has a year of eligibility left, too, so there's a chance he will return next season as a graduate student.
But if he never plays in front of a crowd at Cameron again after tonight, he will know he has accomplished something special.
He always wanted to play basketball for Duke. And he did it, even when it looked like he might never get the chance.
"It's been a dream for me," Peters said. "A lot of people would have given up. That's one of the things that makes me most proud of what I've accomplished. Just being around the program every day, even [when] I was a manager, was a rewarding experience."
