The Peters family had Ivy in their blood and Duke in their hearts. Casey Charles Peters was born August 13, 1988 in Livingston, New Jersey, into a household where every dinner table conversation eventually came back to college sports. His mother Sharon McCloskey was a 1980 Duke graduate, an attorney who would later enroll in the Columbia School of Journalism. His father Kurt had played both baseball and football at Columbia, where he was a first-team All-Ivy League selection — and broke Lou Gehrig's single-season RBI record at the school. His uncle Rex Peters had been an All-America baseball player at Lafayette and a first-round draft pick by the Chicago Cubs in 1971. The genetics were elite. The school was Duke.
Casey grew up in Red Bank, New Jersey, attending Red Bank Regional High School in nearby Little Silver. He was a 6'4" guard with a strong work ethic and elite academic credentials — the kind of player who can score a perfect 800 on the math section of the SAT and have Ivy League coaches calling. By the time he was a senior, he held offers from Yale and Dartmouth. The path was laid out: Ivy League scholarship, Ivy League education, Ivy League basketball.
He turned both schools down. He had wanted to go to Duke since he was a kid — his mother was an alum, the program had always been the dream — and he made the call most recruits never make: he chose to attend Duke as a regular student, hoping for a chance to walk on. Before he even arrived in Durham in fall 2007, he learned the basketball program had no roster spot for him. The coaching staff offered him something else: come work as a team manager. Towels, water bottles, equipment, scouting tape. The behind-the-scenes job that nobody outside the program ever sees.
Peters took it. "Personally, I'm pretty confident," he later told WRAL Sports. "I thought I'd be on the team. At practice I saw how those guys worked and that drove me."
For two seasons — 2007-08 and 2008-09 — Casey Peters was a Duke basketball student manager. He folded uniforms, set out water bottles, kept managers' time during scrimmages, and watched the practices that he would have given anything to be running through. In the offseason, he stayed late and worked out alone. He treated the manager job as the world's longest tryout. He was a 6'4" Duke student who walked into Cameron Indoor Stadium in his official manager polo and dreamed of trading it for a jersey.
In July 2009, two years after he had arrived in Durham as a student manager, Mike Krzyzewski called Casey Peters and told him there was a roster spot for him as a walk-on for the 2009-10 season. The student manager became a Blue Devil. He was issued jersey No. 53 — the kind of high number that signals a walk-on. He was the only player at Duke ever to go essentially "from water boy to the layup line," as FoxSports later put it.