Howard men (Brazil, August 2-13)
There are 8 head coaches in men's college basketball who are former Duke players, and I make a point to highlight them when their team takes a foreign trip. Last year's thread covered Tommy Amaker (
Harvard in Canada), Jeff Capel (
Pittsburgh in Canary Islands/Spain), Johnny Dawkins (
UCF in Italy), and Bobby Hurley (
Arizona State in France/Greece). This year we have two: Kenneth Blakeney, head coach at Howard, and Chris Collins, whose Northwestern team has yet to return from Italy and Greece. As for Duke's Jon Scheyer and Niagara's Greg Paulus, maybe next year.
One of my goals was to capture these familiar head coaches in what I called their "summer tourist casual looks". A definite success here: in the below photo, Coach Blakeney stands out in his Howard T-shirt, rainbow shorts, and fanny pack slung across his chest. Full travel mode. Gotta say, that's a confident man.
Kenny Blakeney played from 1991-1995, the four years of Blue Devil history with which I am the most familiar. I've said in the past that when it came to Duke men's basketball, the Class of 1995 had both the highest highs and the lowest lows, compared to any other graduating class. National title as freshmen? Check. Early NCAA upset in the sophomore year? Check. Narrow loss in the championship game as juniors? Check. Witnessing Coach K's leave of absence and a losing record for the senior season? Sadly, yes, that too.
Blakeney went into coaching immediately after graduation, hired as an assistant coach by Lefty Driesell for 1995-1996, his last season at James Madison. While he never served on a Duke coaching staff, he was occasionally one degree of separation from the Coach K coaching tree. He spent a total of 7 seasons with Delaware, assisting Mike Brey and later David Henderson, and 4 seasons at Harvard under Tommy Amaker. He was named head coach of the Howard Bison in 2019, and his teams have reached the NCAA Tournament in 2023 and 2024, representing the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC).
Coach Blakeney made headlines earlier this month when he
proposed a plan that offered a one-third share of the Howard men's basketball program to private investors for $100 million, in an effort to upgrade facilities, enhance recruiting, and avoid getting left behind by the power conferences:
Kenneth Blakeney revamped Howard University's basketball, seeking investors to modernize the program and ensure national competitiveness amid systemic challenges.
hbcugameday.com
“I don’t want to have a two-tiered system where we’re not able to compete for the NCAA tournament or the national championship,”
Blakeney said via the Washington Post. “And from what I’m hearing right now, that is a real possibility, that there’s going to be an NCAA tournament that isn’t going to include everyone else, it’s just going to include those Power Four universities and maybe the Big East. That’s not what I signed up for.”
Like very slow but predictable clockwork, the school's athletic director chimed in a few days later, telling
ESPN:
"Recent remarks attributed to Coach Blakeney reflect his own personal ideas and have not been vetted by University leadership."
We can't talk about Coach Blakeney at Howard without also mentioning assistant coach Tyler Thornton (circled in the photo above), who played at Duke from 2010-2014. Back then I seem to recall some DBR predictions about his future as a coach, and those people were generally right, even if Coach Thornton did not become Coach K's immediate successor. Thornton was a graduate student and manager at Marquette from 2014-2016, back when Steve Wojciechowski was the head coach. He played semi-pro ball stateside for a season before playing pro in Sweden and Canada. In 2019, he moved to the Washington, DC area, brought in as an assistant coach at Howard in 2019 by newly hired Coach Blakeney. More of the Brotherhood in action; it creates jobs, and is not just a marketing campaign that annoys the Duke haters, though that's certainly a benefit.
That brief promotional
video clip from Coach Thornton above is from Team NILO, which stands for Name, Image, and Likeness Opportunities, and it gives student-athletes a chance to endorse causes they believe in, whether it's a non-profit organization or a socially conscious brand. Their
website is vague on how this works transactionally, and whether they act as an agency when they connect potential endorsers to causes, but I imagine it fills a need. Many college players are new to the public sphere at a time in their lives when they are the most idealistic and the least jaded, and they just want to exert their influence but don't know how.
Many of these summer trips contain some element of education about the history or governance of their destinations. It could be something simple, like touring the local legislature, as the Wichita State women recently did in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Or it could be something deeper, like when the Stanford men visited an American cemetery for fallen World War II soldiers in Normandy
last year. Back in July, members of the Howard team took a
short trip to Capitol Hill to meet with a Congresswoman about helping out with
JAPER, a joint U.S./Brazil plan to promote racial equality.
The team's official announcement,
Bison in Brazil, set forth several goals to help mark the 200th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries, and said that for the past few years, the team had chosen a social focus on maternal health. A blog or a few more articles would have been nice, but instead the team mostly communicated about their trip through social media. This meant that information was harder to track down, especially when you're antisocial like me and refuse to sign up for Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter/X. So aside from running a
youth basketball clinic in Rio de Janeiro, I don't know what work the team did in the political arena. I collected just enough intel about their three exhibition games to list them below.
Howard 78, Liga Sorocabana 62 (Twitter/X halftime score, Twitter/X photos)
The team flew into São Paulo and played their first game August 4 against Liga Sorocabana de Basquete (LSB) in the nearby town of Sorocaba. LSB plays in the second best league of Brazilian pro basketball. The Bison had a one-point lead at halftime, so they created some separation in the second half.
Anwar Gill, a 6-4 grad student guard, celebrated his
birthday with the win. I mention him because he transferred to Howard after 4 years at La Salle, which means he played in Cameron last season as part of the Blue Devil Challenge multi-team event. He scored a team high 17 points for the Explorers. Another grad transfer, 6-5 guard Jaren Johnson, came from Dartmouth, so he also came to Cameron last season for Duke's opener. He played 20 minutes off the bench and scored 2 points.
Completing the short list of somewhat familiar players: 6-9 junior forward Dom Campbell and 6-11 senior forward Mounir Hima. Campbell was a freshman at Notre Dame in 2022-2023, but did not play against Duke. Hima spent the last two seasons at Syracuse, and played 3 minutes in a home game against Duke in February 2023.
Howard 85, Vitória 65 (Twitter/X final score, Twitter/X highlights)
The Bison headed north to the city of Salvador for an August 6 game against Esporte Clube Vitória Basquete, part of the same league as LSB. 6-6 grad student forward Cameron Shockley-Okeke led the Bison with 29 points, 11 rebounds, and 4 assists.
Howard 87, Botafogo 48 (Twitter/X final score, Twitter/X highlights)
The team returned south to play their August 9 finale in Rio de Janeiro against Botafogo Basquete, which plays in Brazil's top-tier pro basketball league. 6-5 freshman guard Blake Harper had 22 points, 9 rebounds, and 5 assists.
A few months ago, Jon Scheyer said something in passing about taking a foreign trip in 2024 or 2025, and while he mentioned Italy as a bucket list item, I think Brazil is a more interesting choice. It's less frequently visited, yet is located in a friendlier time zone, in case they chose to livestream or broadcast their exhibition games -- hint, hint. Coach K has his 2016 Olympics experience in Rio, and now Coach Blakeney has set a more recent precedent. (And if Duke opts to go to Italy instead, Coach Scheyer can ask Johnny Dawkins or Chris Collins for advice. The Brotherhood: it's also a secret travelogue text chain.)
theviigroup.net
www.barstoolsports.com
? I barely remember the 
