Bill Foster

William Edwin Foster was born August 19, 1929 in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania — a Philadelphia suburb hard along the Delaware River. He grew up in nearby Norwood, Pennsylvania, in a working-class household where the kids walked to school and the neighborhood basketball court was where reputations were built. He served in the United States Air Force after high school, then enrolled at Elizabethtown College in central Pennsylvania, where he played varsity basketball starting in 1948 and graduated in 1954 with a Bachelor of Science in business education. He later earned a master's in business education from Temple University in Philadelphia.

His coaching career began the way most coaching careers began in the 1950s — at Pennsylvania high schools. Foster coached at Chichester High School and Abington High School during the late 1950s, building a reputation as a careful, well-organized teacher of the game. In 1960 he made the jump to college basketball, taking the head coaching job at Bloomsburg State College (now Bloomsburg University), a small Pennsylvania state school. In three seasons at Bloomsburg State (1960-63), Foster's teams went a combined 45-11 — a winning percentage of .804. The Pennsylvania prep coach with the master's in business education had announced himself.

In 1963 he was hired by Rutgers University, his first Division I head coaching job. The Scarlet Knights were a New Jersey state university with a basketball program that had never reached the NCAA Tournament and had no winning tradition to speak of. Foster spent eight seasons at Rutgers (1963-71), produced two 20-win seasons (22-7 in 1966-67 and 21-4 in 1968-69), led Rutgers to its first-ever postseason appearance — a third-place finish in the 1967 NIT — and recruited a young point guard from Cape May Court House, New Jersey named Jim Valvano. Valvano played three seasons at Rutgers under Foster, became a team captain, and would later carry his coach's competitive intensity into his own legendary head coaching career at NC State, culminating in the 1983 NCAA Championship. Foster also coached Bob Lloyd at Rutgers — the program's first All-American. By the time Foster left for Utah in 1971, eight of his Rutgers players ranked among the top 50 scorers in school history.

The University of Utah brought him out West to replace the legendary Jack Gardner. Foster spent three seasons in Salt Lake City (1971-74), going 43-39 overall and capping his Utes tenure by leading them to the 1974 NIT Championship game — where Utah lost to Purdue but finished the year 22-8 and ranked. The 1974 NIT runner-up finish made Foster the kind of program-builder who got phone calls from athletic directors at programs in trouble.

Duke was in trouble. After Vic Bubas had retired in 1969 following four Final Fours in his eleven-year tenure, the Blue Devils had collapsed under Bucky Waters and one-year interim Neill McGeachy. Duke had finished last in the Atlantic Coast Conference for four consecutive seasons. Cameron Indoor Stadium had become a place fans visited reluctantly. The 1973-74 squad had gone 10-16. As the DBR's archive captures: "After [interim coach Neill McGeachy] left, then-A.D. Carl James bizarrely tried to hire a senile Adolph Rupp. The only reason Rupp declined was because of a fire at his farm which he felt would have been hard to manage remotely." So Duke turned to Foster.

He accepted in March 1974. As he later told writers about the moment of decision: "I knew Duke from the [Vic] Bubas years when they were great, and I thought they could be great again, should be great again. I was a little shocked when they offered me the job, it just seemed like a great place to coach."

The first three Foster seasons at Duke were the rebuilding seasons. The 1974-75 team, inherited rotation, went 13-13 — but produced the season's signature moment when Duke upset eighth-ranked North Carolina 99-96 in overtime in the Big Four Tournament. The 1975-76 team went 13-14. The 1976-77 team went 14-13. After three years, Foster's Duke record was a perfectly mediocre 40-40. The Cameron Crazies stayed patient. The administration stayed patient. Foster, slowly, was building something.

He was building it through recruiting. In 1975 he signed Jim Spanarkel, a 6'5" pigeon-toed guard from Jersey City whom no one outside the New York metro area knew much about. Spanarkel would become a three-time All-American, the program's all-time scoring leader at the time of his graduation, and the kind of player whose presence in the program changed everything around him. In 1976 Foster signed Mike Gminski, a 6'11" center from Monroe, Connecticut, who was eligible to graduate from high school a year early and arrived at Duke at age 16. Gminski would become a two-time All-American, the 1980 ACC Player of the Year, the school's leading rebounder ever, and a 14-year NBA pro. In 1977 Foster pulled off the recruiting coup of the era: Gene Banks, a 6'7" forward from West Philadelphia known nationally as "Tinkerbell," ranked higher in his class than Magic Johnson, who chose Duke over UCLA. Banks would become Duke's first McDonald's All-American and a two-time First-Team All-ACC pick. Foster also added Kenny "Dirty Dog" Dennard in 1977, a feisty 6'7" forward from King, North Carolina, and Bob Bender, a transfer from Bobby Knight's 1976 undefeated Indiana NCAA Champions, plus John Harrell transferring in from nearby North Carolina Central.

The 1977-78 season was the magic. Duke went 27-7. Banks and Dennard arrived as freshmen and started immediately. Spanarkel was the senior leader. Gminski was the sophomore center. Bender was the steady transfer point guard. The Blue Devils won the ACC Tournament — Duke's first ACC tournament title in twelve years. They won the 1978 Big Four Tournament by upsetting top-ranked North Carolina. They earned the No. 7 ranking in the final AP poll. They beat Rhode Island in the NCAA Tournament's opening round. They beat Pennsylvania. They beat Villanova. In the NCAA Final Four in St. Louis, they upset a Notre Dame squad that started eight future NBA players in the national semifinal — and reached the NCAA Championship Game for the first time since 1966. The opponent was Joe B. Hall's Kentucky.

Duke lost 94-88. The Wildcats were a Goliath; Duke had been the Cinderella. After the final buzzer, the Blue Devils came onto the floor with their arms linked to receive the runner-up trophy — a single image that became the iconic visual of college basketball's romantic side. As one national writer captured it at the time: "Kentucky won the national championship in St. Louis but Duke won the nation's heart." John Feinstein would later write a book about the 1977-78 squad called Forever's Team — Duke's spiritual answer to Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run: young, wildly gifted, born to run.

Foster was named 1978 NABC National Coach of the Year. He was named 1978 ACC Coach of the Year. He had taken Duke from four straight last-place ACC finishes to within a single game of the national championship in four years.

The 1978-79 season produced Duke's first ACC regular-season championship under Foster (12-2 in conference, 22-8 overall), but injuries and chemistry issues prevented the team from making another tournament run. Duke was upset by St. John's in the NCAA second round.

The 1979-80 season started with Duke at No. 1 in the country. The Blue Devils went 12-0 to open the year. Then Kenny Dennard was injured. The team scuffled through ACC play. By February, with Duke 5-6 in conference and rumors swirling about Foster's future, the program was in turmoil. The Washington Post's Dave Kindred wrote of "college basketball's version of Paradise Lost." Duke regrouped. They won the 1980 ACC Tournament — Foster's second — and reached the Sweet Sixteen, beating second-ranked Kentucky in Rupp Arena along the way before falling to Purdue in the Elite Eight.

Foster's six-year Duke record: 113-64 (.638). 3 NCAA Tournaments. 2 ACC Tournament titles. 1 ACC regular-season title. 1 Final Four. 1 NCAA Championship Game appearance. He produced three All-Americans (Spanarkel, Gminski, Banks). He took Duke from four straight last-place ACC finishes to a national-runner-up team. He had, in DBR's later assessment, "got Duke back off the mat."

Then he left.

Foster's departure from Duke in 1980 was complicated, regretted, and ultimately formative — formative not just for him but for the entire Duke basketball program that would follow him. His longtime assistant Bob Wenzel told John Feinstein years later that the seeds of Foster's departure had been sown in February 1980, during the down stretch of the 1979-80 regular season. Foster had felt unsupported. He had been, by some accounts, exhausted. "I realized that it would have been out of character for him to stay," Wenzel told Feinstein. The University of South Carolina, then a major-conference independent, had an opening — Frank McGuire was being pushed out — and South Carolina AD Jim Carlen was offering Foster the chance to start fresh, to build another program from the ground up.

Foster gave Carlen a verbal commitment. Then his Duke team, in the very moment he was deciding to leave, won the 1980 ACC Tournament. The emotional pull of the players' performance was real — how do you leave the kids who just gave you everything? — but Duke AD Tom Butters wanted a decision. Foster wouldn't go back on his verbal to Carlen. He resigned at Duke with the understanding he could coach through the NCAA Tournament. Duke lost to Purdue in the Elite Eight. The next day, Bill Foster was introduced as the head coach at South Carolina.

Ten days later, Duke hired Mike Krzyzewski, a 33-year-old Army head coach few outside West Point had heard of. The Foster-to-Krzyzewski transition would, in retrospect, be the most consequential moment in modern Duke basketball — but only because the foundation Foster left behind was strong enough to attract a successor like Krzyzewski. As DBR captured it: "Coach K came to Duke only two years removed from a Final Four. Duke had the glow of 1978 for a long time. People knew it could happen at Duke. When Krzyzewski said he saw Duke as a regular top five team, people had seen Duke at that level recently. It was no longer a stretch, thanks to Foster."

The Krzyzewski-Foster relationship was respectful for the rest of Foster's life. When Foster passed away in 2016, Krzyzewski's statement at age 68 captured what Duke had received from the Foster era: "We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Coach Bill Foster, who was such a vital part of this program's rich history. His Blue Devil teams from the late 1970s were among the best to ever play at Duke. As accomplished as he was as a basketball coach, anyone who knew Bill would agree he had one of the uniquely exuberant personalities in the sport that he loved so much. His legacy will not only be the significant basketball contributions he made, but the millions of smiles he helped create along the way."

Krzyzewski expanded on the same theme during a 2019 South Carolina visit: "Coach Foster really is one of the outstanding coaches and guys in the game. Great promoter. Really helped move the needle for Duke in those late '70s because, after coach (Vic) Bubas left in the '60s, the start of the '70s was a rocky time."

Foster's South Carolina tenure (1980-86) was a study in ambition meeting circumstance. He inherited a roster of Frank McGuire holdovers and went 17-10 in 1980-81. The program slid in the next two years. Then in 1982-83 he produced his best Gamecocks team — 22-9 with two NIT wins, a 22-win season at his fourth different program, making him the first NCAA coach in history to take four different programs to 20-win seasons. The next year, South Carolina joined the Metro Conference. In December 1983, Foster suffered a moderate heart attack late in a game against Purdue (which South Carolina won 59-53); he collapsed in the dressing room afterward. He recovered but was, in his own assessment, never quite the same coach. He resigned at South Carolina in 1986 after a losing season. The NCAA placed the Gamecocks on two years' probation in 1987 for rules violations during Foster's tenure.

In April 1986, Foster took the head coaching job at Northwestern University. He stayed seven seasons (1986-93) and went 54-141. The Wildcats produced winning non-conference records and signature wins — including a stunning 1988 upset of defending NCAA champion Indiana, his old Big Ten rival Bob Knight — but couldn't compete with Big Ten powerhouses for top recruits. Foster told friends later that he took the Northwestern job partly because the campus reminded him of Duke.

After stepping down at Northwestern in 1993, Foster served as Northwestern's interim athletic director through January 1994, then moved into conference administration as associate commissioner of the Southwest Conference (which dissolved in 1996), and worked as a consultant for the Western Athletic Conference and Big 12 Conference in retirement. He served on the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Board of Trustees and was its chairman from 1996 to 1998 — a fitting capstone for a coach who had done as much administrative work for the sport as on-court coaching.

Bill Foster passed away on January 7, 2016, in Chicago, Illinois. He was 86 years old. His career résumé closed at 467-409 across 33 collegiate head coaching seasons, with one Final Four, three NIT appearances, and the distinction of being the first NCAA Division I men's basketball coach to lead four different programs to 20-win seasons. The Foster Classic still appears on annual ACC schedules. The Rutgers Athletics Hall of Fame, into which Foster was inducted in 1994, remembers him for "ushering in the first truly successful era in Rutgers basketball history." The Duke basketball program, in which his name now appears alongside Vic Bubas and Mike Krzyzewski as one of the three coaches who built the modern era, has retained "Forever's Team" — John Feinstein's name for Foster's 1977-78 squad — as part of its institutional vocabulary.

Kenny Dennard, the freshman whose 1977-78 freshman season under Foster ended with a national-championship-game arms-linked walk to receive the runner-up trophy, told Feinstein years later about Foster's complicated departure: "He was the right coach for Duke and Duke was the right place for him. But he just didn't understand. He couldn't deal with things." The acknowledgment that Foster's exit had been emotional, fraught, and possibly preventable became the dominant Duke-program memory of the 1980 transition.

But the deeper acknowledgment is what Foster left behind — and what came next. Without Bill Foster, there is no 1978 Final Four. Without the 1978 Final Four, Tom Butters does not have the credibility to gamble on an unknown 33-year-old Army coach with a 9-17 final West Point season. Without Mike Krzyzewski's 42-year run, Duke is not the global brand it has become. The chain runs cleanly, and the foundational link is Foster. The Brotherhood as we know it stands on what he built — and it stands on the players he recruited (Gene Banks and Kenny Dennard, the first two Brotherhood-era stars) who Krzyzewski inherited as his initial roster. The 1978 nation's-heart team's arms-linked walk became, decades later, the kind of image that recruiters at the highest level still reference. The exuberant, smile-creating, program-restoring Pennsylvania kid from Norwood with the Elizabethtown College degree took a Duke program in the basement and walked away from a Duke program in the ACC penthouse — and the whole thing remained a launching pad for the Krzyzewski era. There is, in the larger arc of this program, no Duke basketball without Bill Foster.