Duke basketball's March Madness secret weapon isn't Cooper Flagg, it's vulnerability

New York Times

27-03-2025

DURHAM, N.C. — Nine months ago, long before Duke clinched its Sweet 16 berth, Jon Scheyer gathered all his players and coaches in the team's film room for what they thought would be an ordinary meeting.
At that point in June 2024, most of the Blue Devils — including star freshman Cooper Flagg, whom Scheyer built his roster around — had been on campus only a few days. Scheyer knew he needed them to jell, quickly, if his program was realistically going to have a shot at winning its sixth national championship. But as players and staff sank into their blue-cushioned chairs, the third-year coach quickly ceded the front of the room to a visitor, who posed two pointed questions that quickly caught the room's attention.
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The first, to Duke's players: Would you rather play 10 years in the NBA, but go .500 this season … or never play a second in the NBA, but win three national championships in college?
Then the second, to Scheyer and the rest of Duke's coaches: Would you rather win a string of championships but never send a player to the NBA … or send a ton to the NBA, but never win a ring in college?
The results?
Most of Duke's players, meekly at first, picked the 10-year NBA career. Duke's staff, on the other hand, chose to win multiple championships. Talk about awkward …
'It's always the elephant in the room,' assistant coach Emanuel Dildy said.
Sweet 16 up next‼️
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— Duke Men's Basketball (@DukeMBB) March 23, 2025
But that's why Russ Rausch, who Scheyer had hired a month earlier as Duke's mental skills coach, asked those questions in the first place. He wanted to address the elephant directly — meaning those contrasting answers were actually exactly what he hoped to hear. It's been part of the process that has fortified the Blue Devils' mindsets, one of the reasons Duke is the betting favorite to win the NCAA Tournament.
'The point of all that was, ultimately, we're all going to do what's best for ourselves,' Rausch said. 'There's an element of shame, and I'm trying to get rid of that. … If we don't acknowledge that difference of motive, and we just shame players all the time — you're not a team guy, whatever — then that doesn't get results.'
Rausch's advice to Scheyer and his staff was not to give in to every player's desires, but to acknowledge it's OK for them to feel the way they did. To tell the Blue Devils, basically, not to suppress their emotions.
'What I'm getting them to see is, you care most about yourself, that's fine. But what's the best path for you? Everything your coach wants — because that's everything an NBA exec wants,' Rausch added. 'If you're not good enough to start right now, it isn't because the coach doesn't like you; it's because you need to do some work.'
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That was, admittedly, not the easiest thing for a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings to hear, especially not during their first week on campus. But Scheyer's young Blue Devils heard Rausch's message loud and clear. By publicly airing all their respective perspectives, Duke's players and coaches were forced to reckon with uncomfortable realities right from the jump, which, ultimately, got everyone on the same page. As freshman center Khaman Maluach said, 'That brought us closer.'
With Duke two wins away from its next milestone — making its first Final Four under Scheyer — it's become apparent that mental coaching behind-the-scenes has been one of this talented team's secret weapons.
'He makes you put everything on the table, which allows the guys to kind of drop their defense mechanisms and allows the vulnerability to come out,' Dildy said. 'This team is vulnerable, which has also made them more connected, because you don't have anybody in there pretending. It's all out there.'
After Duke's Elite Eight loss to NC State in last season's tournament, Scheyer sought out someone to help him 'think the game.' Specifically? Scheyer wanted another voice to help him walk the fine line between instructional coaching and running kids off.
'A lot of coaches feel this way,' Rausch said. 'How do you work with today's athlete, who is maybe a little less open to hard coaching? And they'll leave you if you coach them too hard.'
Utah Jazz coach Will Hardy, one of Scheyer's closest friends in the business, had previously worked with Rausch and passed his name along to Scheyer. But what began as Rausch working with Scheyer specifically quickly became an entire staff effort, and eventually Duke's whole team. Rausch has done weekly video calls with Duke's coaches ever since, and visits campus at least once a month for work with the team at large. He also gave out his cell phone number so players and coaches could reach him at any time, and has even traveled to several of Duke's biggest games, including a loss against Kansas in Las Vegas around Thanksgiving.
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The dividends of all that banked time?
'He's challenged the norms of coaching for me,' Scheyer said, 'and he's also challenged the norms of the stuff you should think about as a player.'
Rausch's unconventional thinking, at least partially, is the result of his unconventional path.
He is not a clinically trained sports psychologist. Rather, he's a former hedge fund executive from Chicago. But after 15 years of being worn down by the grind, Rausch started researching the science of unhappiness. He stumbled upon two TED Talks — one being 'My Stroke of Insight,' by Dr. Jill Taylor — that rewired his worldview.
Taylor, a Harvard-educated neuroanatomist, explains in her speech how she recovered from a stroke she suffered in 1996, when a blood vessel burst in her brain and shut off her left hemisphere: the half responsible for our perceptions of the past and expectations for the future. With that part of Taylor's brain suddenly offline, she could no longer fixate on old mistakes or stress about upcoming problems. Instead, she was forced to live in the present moment.
'That really spoke to me because you think about, 'I'm overthinking, I'm beating myself up, I'm pissed off about stuff, and I don't handle things very well,'' Rausch said.
As Rausch dove deeper into his research, he focused on training that part of his brain to better serve him. Before long, he'd quit his job and founded Vision Pursue, which has a mission to 'dramatically improve the way people experience life by improving their mindset with mental training, mindfulness and meditation.'
Rausch eventually found his way into the sports world after connecting with Dan Quinn, then the Seattle Seahawks' defensive coordinator, in 2014. One of Rausch's teachings that Quinn immediately took to was the importance of specificity: providing players with exact instructions and information, instead of speaking in generalities.
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Rather than telling athletes to 'play tough,' for example, how could they play tough? Rausch learned from studying UCLA legend John Wooden, who still holds the NCAA record with 10 national championships. Psychologists who studied Wooden found that offering specific instructions, even ones as simple as grabbing rebounds with both hands, led to performance increases.
That was exactly the sort of instructional coaching Scheyer was hoping to lean further into.
In one of Rausch's first meetings with Duke's players, he asked them to do some simple math.
Say they took 15 shots in a game. How long does it take to shoot? Two seconds, maybe? So even with 15 shots in a game, that was only 30 seconds accounted for.
Out of a 40-minute contest.
'So 98 percent of the game is not that,' said forward Neal Begovich, whose former Stanford teammates worked with Rausch last season. 'You can control the other 98 percent, so that's how you should gauge whether you're playing well or not — and for our guys, that really resonated.'
As the 7-foot-2 Maluach put it: 'He will really help you clear your mind, and set you in the right position to be able to do the 98 percent.'
Maluach was born in South Sudan, grew up in Uganda, and played at the NBA Academy Africa before joining Duke. When he first arrived, Scheyer specifically asked Rausch to work with the five-star recruit as he adjusted to American basketball and life. Maluach had worked with a mental coach at the NBA Academy, so he was familiar with the concept, but 'Russ was like the next level,' he said.
Considering how hectic Maluach's summer was, highlighted by playing for South Sudan in the Paris Olympics, Rausch was a resource for the 18-year-old as much as anyone on Duke's roster. 'I knew I was going to need it,' Maluach said, 'especially coming in as an international freshman with a lot to learn and a lot of stuff happening.'
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Maluach still speaks to Rausch almost every game day.
'Going into games when I'm nervous or maybe scared, and he's telling me those emotions are helping me,' Maluach said. 'Trying to teach your mind to tell you that you're not tired. Stuff like that.'
Maluach is also one of many Blue Devils who uses Rausch's 'Vision Pursue' app on their phones, although everyone uses it differently. Maluach, for instance, has different hype videos with his highlights loaded into it, which he can watch pregame to get psyched up. He's also downloaded guided meditations, which he'll sometimes use late at night to help fall asleep. Dildy has it, too, and says the morning routine Rausch taught him, which includes breathwork, has 'helped a lot with managing stress, energy and anxiety.'
Even Flagg has the app, saying he most values the breathing techniques Rausch has programmed.
'I've never worked with somebody like that before, so it's been a really cool experience the whole year,' Flagg said. 'He laid out a good roadmap for us of what he's trying to do.'
Before Duke played at rival North Carolina in its regular-season finale, Rausch set up a video call between Duke's staff and Quinn, now the head coach of the Washington Commanders, who were fresh off an NFC Championship Game appearance against one of their rivals, the Philadelphia Eagles. With Duke set to enter a hostile environment that weekend, and in the postseason thereafter, Rausch figured Quinn and his experiences could be a helpful resource.
Just as he'd suggested that Joe Mazzulla, head coach of the NBA champion Boston Celtics, speak to Quinn's Commanders before the NFC title game. Rausch serves as a consultant for Mazzulla, Quinn's Commanders, Hardy's Jazz, the Miami Dolphins and more.
And with Duke entering the penultimate weekend of the season, anything that might give the Blue Devils any advantage is more than worth trying.
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'Scheyer's willingness to go all into it,' Begovich said, '(means) you kind of have to, if that makes sense. You can't go half in on it.'
And Duke hasn't. With Blue Devils tackling tough emotions and circumstances head-on — then the team's chosen motto this season should come as no surprise: The obstacle is the way.
(Photo of Cooper Flagg, Tyrese Proctor and Khaman Maluach: Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)