Road to Duke
On Christmas Eve 1968, Andy Borman's grandfather orbited the Moon. Frank Borman, the West Point graduate-turned-Air Force colonel-turned-astronaut, was commanding Apollo 8 — the first crewed mission to leave Earth's orbit and circle another world — when he and crewmates Jim Lovell and William Anders took turns reading from the Book of Genesis on what was at the time the most-watched television broadcast in human history. "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." The Earthrise photograph was taken on that mission. The Apollo program's first lunar transit. The Congressional Space Medal of Honor. Frank Borman was a quintessential Cold Warrior, a no-nonsense engineer who told historians he flew Apollo 8 because "space was the ultimate battlefield" and the goal was beating the Soviets. He retired from NASA in 1970, became chairman of Eastern Air Lines, and lived to be 95 years old.
His grandson Andy was born into that legacy in suburban Morrisville, North Carolina — but it wasn't Andy's only inheritance. Andy's mother is the sister of Mickie Krzyzewski, which means Andy is Coach K's nephew. Two of the most famous American families converged in one kid: an astronaut on his father's side, a Hall of Fame basketball coach on his mother's. The historical overlap was that Coach K — West Point class of 1969 — had attended the academy in years when Frank Borman was still on faculty there teaching thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, and the two men knew each other independently long before their families intertwined.
Andy grew up in the Triangle, which meant growing up around Duke basketball. His uncle was building a dynasty fifteen minutes from his house. He was at Cameron Indoor Stadium for games while still in elementary school. He played both basketball and soccer through high school, but soccer was where he was actually elite — a top recruit for the Duke men's soccer program out of IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, where he'd spent his prep years. He came to Duke on a soccer commitment, not a basketball one.
What happened next is the only known origin story in Brotherhood history that begins with a phone call from the head coach to the player's mom's sister's son. "During the summer before his freshman year, Borman received a phone call from his uncle," the Greensboro News & Record later reported. "Coach K said that if I was able to juggle my soccer and academic schedules without much difficulty, he'd like me to try out for basketball when the soccer season ended." Andy jumped at it. He'd be a soccer starter and a basketball walk-on. The grandson of an astronaut, the nephew of the coach, dressing for fall soccer matches and winter basketball practices on the same Duke campus.
At Duke
Andy Borman's Duke basketball career, by the box score, looks like nothing. Forty career games across five academic years (1999-2004). Zero starts. 0.4 points, 0.3 rebounds, 0.1 assists per game in 2.0 minutes per outing. He took almost no shots. He had one rebound and zero assists his entire freshman season. The Greensboro News & Record headline summarized it accurately: "Astronaut's Grandson, Coach's Nephew Fills Last Seat on Bench."
What the box score misses is that Andy Borman was simultaneously a three-year starter on the Duke men's soccer team — a real Division I athlete in a different sport, training hard in fall, then walking into Cameron in late November and trying to keep up with a basketball roster that included Jay Williams, Mike Dunleavy Jr., Carlos Boozer, Chris Duhon, Shane Battier, J.J. Redick, Dahntay Jones, Daniel Ewing, Luol Deng, and Shelden Williams. Two of the most decorated rosters in college basketball history. He was the soccer player who showed up after his sport was over and tried to hold his own in practice against future NBA All-Stars.
He did, mostly. As a freshman, his uncle would tease him in news conferences — playfully implying Andy was on the team only because of family — and Andy would compete hard the next day in practice. Senior teammate Nate James, a captain, didn't take kindly to the nephew status and pushed him relentlessly. Andy didn't back down. "Andy has a healthy ego, and he adds a level of toughness to a team," Coach K told the News & Record. "He's more valuable to our team than I thought he'd be."
Andy's own framing of his role was disarmingly direct: "I just want to be recognized as a worker who doesn't quit. How much I play isn't as important to me as how we do as a team." He played 12 minutes total his freshman year, in 10 of Duke's 34 games. He never took a shot. Zero rebounds, zero assists, zero blocks, zero steals. He went home and came back the next year and did it again.
The 2001 NCAA Championship is the one Andy will carry forever. He was a sophomore on the bench when Battier hit the dagger, when Williams sealed the title against Arizona at the Metrodome — the same Metrodome where, twenty miles away, his cousin's class teammate Nick Horvath grew up. Andy didn't play in the title game. But he was in uniform on the floor when the buzzer sounded, and the championship ring on his finger says NATIONAL CHAMPION the same as Battier's and Williams's. He was a 19-year-old walk-on with a championship and four years of college left.
He took a redshirt year in 2002-03 — the only season in his Duke career where he didn't appear in a basketball game, focusing on soccer and academics. He came back as a fifth-year in 2003-04 for one of the most decorated senior classes in Duke history: Chris Duhon, Daniel Ewing, Nick Horvath, and Borman himself. The 2004 squad reached the Final Four, losing to UConn in the national semifinal. Andy played in 16 games that final season — his most of any year — averaging 0.4 PPG. The walk-up to Senior Day was emotional. At his March 2004 press conference before the UNC home finale, Coach K spoke publicly about it: "It always is emotional on Senior Day. We have a couple of walk-ons, but one of them's my nephew, Andy Borman, who I'm very, very close to."
Andy graduated in May 2004 with a Bachelor of Arts in History. Two national title runs (2001 won, 2004 reached the Final Four), two roster spots that scouts never tracked, two Senior Days he watched from the bench. The Final Four trip was his final game in a Duke uniform. He was 23 years old, a national champion, and — like his grandfather thirty-six years earlier when Apollo 8 splashed down in the Pacific — done with the field he'd just spent five years inside, ready for whatever came next.
After Duke
He didn't play professionally. He couldn't have — he was a walk-on guard who'd averaged 0.4 PPG. But he wanted to stay in basketball, and what Andy Borman discovered almost immediately was that he had inherited from his uncle the one thing his grandfather had inherited from West Point: the ability to read other people's talent and pull it out of them.
His coaching career started small. In 2004-05 he was the Director of Player Development at Cal-Berkeley under Ben Braun. The next year he was the Director of Basketball Operations at San Jose State. Both were entry-level back-of-staff jobs, the kind young Duke alums get on the strength of their alma mater alone. He went off the college radar after that and built something of his own.
He founded The Athlete Within Basketball School and the Illinois Old School AAU Program, then spent 2010-2012 as the Director of the IMG Basketball Academy in Bradenton — the same Florida prep program where Andy himself had played as a high schooler. He was, by 2012, one of the best-connected non-college basketball minds in America. Then in 2014 came the call that changed his trajectory: become Executive Director of the New York Renaissance, the legendary Harlem-based AAU and EYBL program with roots going back to the 1923 New York Rens — the all-Black professional team that beat the original Boston Celtics for the world's professional title in 1925, and arguably the most historically significant basketball franchise no one outside the deepest hoops circles knows about.
For the next eight years (2014-2022), Andy Borman ran the NY Rens. He coached their 17U EYBL team. He worked directly with the kids the entire college basketball world wanted: Jose Alvarado (now a starting guard for the New Orleans Pelicans), Kofi Cockburn (Illinois), Hamidou Diallo (Kentucky/NBA), Jordan Nwora (Louisville/NBA), Dominick Barlow (NBA), Jonathan Kuminga (Warriors lottery pick), and a kid from upstate New York named Kyle Filipowski who would become a five-star Duke recruit — and yes, Andy's connection helped get him to Durham, where Filipowski would star for Jon Scheyer's Blue Devils. The Rens placed over 100 players in Division I scholarships under Borman. Filipowski's open letter about his AAU coach was telling: "Coach Andy Borman is an amazing guy. Definitely one of my favorite and best coaches I have played for. He has created his own image and respect by doing his passion by helping us players with our dreams and goals." Read it again — the kid carefully said "his own image," not piggybacking on his uncle.
In August 2022, Penny Hardaway hired Borman as an assistant coach at the University of Memphis. The fit was clear: Borman brought a national recruiting Rolodex and a Final Four-and-Champion pedigree to a Tigers staff that needed both. His first season at Memphis — 2022-23 — they went 26-9, won the program's first AAC Championship, beat the nation's #1 ranked team for the first time in school history, and made the NCAA Tournament. His second season went 22-10 with another tournament bid. By any measure, he'd justified the hire.
But Hardaway's Memphis tenure has been famously turbulent — "nine assistant coaches in Penny's tenure to leave or be fired," as the Daily Memphian put it — and in May 2024, Memphis announced Borman would not return. He was the latest in a long line of staff changes. Hardaway told Hoops HQ later he had ascribed the dizzying array of hirings and firings to "a combination of inexperience, poor judgement and excessive loyalty." Andy was 42 years old, and he had a wife (Shawn Catherine Borman) and a young son (Leo Alexander), and the question of what came next was open in a way it hadn't been for him in a decade.
Where Is He Now
His grandfather Frank died on November 7, 2023, at age 95, in Billings, Montana. The Apollo 8 commander outlived 24 of the 28 humans who'd ever orbited or walked on the Moon. The funeral and obituaries traced the arc of a 20th-century American life: Tucson high school, West Point, Air Force, Caltech, NASA, the Moon, Eastern Air Lines, the boards of Home Depot and National Geographic. Five months later, Andy was out of the Memphis job. The two losses came close together. The grandfather who taught him what discipline looked like was gone, and the second NCAA coaching stop where he'd gotten to use the discipline was finished.
What he has, still, is what he built. The New York Rens are still the New York Rens, the historic Harlem program rooted in basketball's earliest civil rights chapter. The IMG Basketball Academy is still the IMG Basketball Academy. Andy's network of NBA players — Alvarado, Cockburn, Diallo, Nwora, Kuminga, Barlow, Filipowski, and the dozens behind them — are all still calling him, still looking to him for the next thing. His Duke connection runs deeper than blood now: he's the bridge between Coach K's program and the post-K Brotherhood under Scheyer, the Krzyzewski-family tie who helped land a five-star center who became an NBA lottery pick. His grandfather's example was that you could fly to the Moon and then go run an airline; that you don't have to be one thing your whole life; that the discipline travels.
Andy lives in Memphis still, with Shawn Catherine and Leo Alexander. He's 43 years old. He's the grandson of a man who orbited the Moon and the nephew of a man who won five national championships, and he was a 0.4-PPG walk-on at Duke who's now placed over a hundred kids in Division I programs. The next coaching stop hasn't been announced. Whatever it is, it'll be his — built on his name, not the inherited ones. That was always the project. The walk-on who didn't quit. The kid who took the call from his uncle the summer before freshman year and showed up. Still showing up.