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"This is what a team is all about," Rennie told them in the post-game huddle. "Be very proud of that."
Statement made.
Rennie's teams have been making statements ever since he arrived on campus in 1979 from Columbia University. Rennie grew up in Chatham, New Jersey, playing soccer because his local high school had banned football. An illustrious career as a forward at Temple University—he scored six goals in his first game—was cut short by an injury, and Rennie made the natural transition to coaching.
"It's as much the coaching as it is the sport," Rennie said. He started coaching and teaching after college but quickly found that interacting with the players on the practice field and in the locker room was more rewarding than lecturing in a classroom. "I couldn't play a whole lot anymore, so I tried coaching and found it was the next best thing."
Rennie started his coaching career at Southeastern Massachusetts University (now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth) then went on to spend six years at Columbia. After winning the Ivy League title in 1978, he believed he had accomplished all he could at Columbia. In the academically fixated Ivy League, he sometimes felt that the university was embarrassed to be too good on the field. In Duke, Rennie saw a school that unabashedly combined academic and athletic excellence. In Rennie, Duke saw the coach who could take the Blue Devils from a non-funded, part-time program that had made just one NCAA tournament to national prominence.
In the twenty-nine years since, Rennie has led Duke to twenty tournament appearances, including five trips to the College Cup and five ACC Championships. The evidence of that success fills Rennie's office on the second floor of the Murray Building. Through the room's window, partially eclipsed by the first-floor roof, you can catch a glimpse of Koskinen Stadium, the 7,000-seat home of the Blue Devils, built in 1999.
A bookcase next to the window serves as a pedestal for the trophies Rennie's teams have accumulated. A framed collection of captains' armbands created for the coach's twenty-fifth anniversary adorns the opposite wall. Jerseys of former players turned pro hang on the wall facing his desk. (One of those former players, All-American John Kerr '87, now the coach at Harvard University, will replace him.) The most important trophy of all—the one marking that first-ever national championship for a Duke team, won by Rennie's Blue Devils in 1986—resides in the Hall of Fame next to Cameron Indoor Stadium.
The 2007 Blue Devils are determined to add to their coach's already-extensive collection. The players are experienced, perhaps even arrogant about their chances, but, unlike their Ivy League peers, one thing they aren't is embarrassed about success. There's no such thing as too good in Duke athletics.
The momentum from Grossman's golden goal against Maryland carried Duke to road wins over the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and Clemson University. In those three games, the Blue Devils avenged all of their regular-season losses from 2006.
But then Duke was back to struggling, back to the nadir on the undulating EEG. The Blue Devils fell into a four-game tailspin, losing to Boston College, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest University before tying Virginia Tech. The Tar Heels stunned the Blue Devils in double overtime while the Demon Deacons spoiled Senior Night—for the thirteen seniors and Rennie—by manhandling Duke 3-0.
Rennie was doing his best to keep the team upbeat and focused. "I think we're getting better," he told them after the loss at UNC. "We played a great game. Do not put your heads down; there's a long way to go."
On Thursday, October 25, Duke traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia, to save its season. The four-game winless streak left the Blue Devils under .500 in the conference; the Cavaliers were a similarly talented team struggling in the ever-rugged ACC.
Friday morning, the day of the game, dawned cold, bleak, and wet. After a quick breakfast at the Doubletree Hotel, the Blue Devils traveled to the Virginia campus to get used to the field conditions and walk through the basic strategy for that night's game. The horrendous weather, however, relegated them to a simple jog to loosen up before sprinting back to get on the bus.
Seven hours later, nothing had changed, except that the field at Klockner Stadium was even soggier and the sense of desperation had doubled now that both teams had taken the field for warmups. Rennie didn't hide his discontent with the stadium, starting with the unconventional placement of the benches in a dugout below field level. The pillars in front of the stadium commemorating the Cavaliers' four straight national championships in the early '90s—one coming after a victory over Duke in the semifinals—didn't add to the charm for the Blue Devils' coach.
"This is as important as any regular-season game can get," Rennie told his team in a cramped and suffocatingly humid concrete locker room. A loss could leave Duke—the No. 4 team in the nation at the start of the season—at home for the NCAA tournament.
An early second-half goal put the Cavaliers ahead, and the Blue Devils worked manically to tie the game late. The final twelve minutes of regulation were played almost entirely on Virginia's end of the field, with Duke applying constant pressure on Cavalier goalie Michael Giallombardo. It was like the final moments of a boxing match, the Blue Devils trying to get in as many punches as possible before the final bell. Rennie even substituted forward Paul Dudley for defender Jepson to add another offensive threat to the already-crowded box.
As the game's intensity peaked, so did Duke's frustration. Every reserve in the tiny dugout was standing—the bench had collapsed during halftime—pleading for a goal, any kind of goal, anything to replace the zero under Duke on the scoreboard. As a shot flew just over the crossbar, a Duke player spiked his Gatorade water bottle in disgust. At a dubious foul call by the referee, Rennie cried incredulously, "Every time he blows the whistle, the call is wrong." As the clock dipped under two minutes, the Duke bench got louder, and more desperate: "One more chance, guys!" One more chance!
The Blue Devils got that last chance, and finally, through the rain, the wind, and a month of defeat, finally they made it count. Grossman's pass crossed into the box and somehow slipped through the crowd of Virginia defenders before finding the head of graduate student Joshua Medcalf—the forward known as "Bear"—who knocked it into the back of the net for the ecstatic equalizer.
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