Road to Duke
Clay Buckley grew up in Wayne, Pennsylvania, the leafy suburb of Philadelphia just up the Main Line, in the kind of public-school basketball pipeline that has been quietly producing Division I prospects for decades. He enrolled at Conestoga High School in the fall of 1983, a tall ninth-grader on a varsity roster, and by the time he walked off the Conestoga floor four years later in the spring of 1987 he had rewritten the school record book. He left Conestoga as the school's all-time leading scorer and the school's all-time leading rebounder, a Philadelphia-area first-team all-state forward, and a Division I scholarship-caliber prospect with the kind of length and footwork that translates to the post regardless of competition level. Years later, when Conestoga established its Athletic Hall of Fame, Clay Buckley would be a member of the inaugural class.
He chose Duke. Mike Krzyzewski's program in 1987 was three years past the painful 1986 national title game loss to Louisville, two years past the Tommy Amaker class, and was about to add freshman guard Quin Snyder and freshman wing Phil Henderson to a roster led by senior guard Tommy Amaker and All-American junior wing Danny Ferry. Coach K's recruiting class for the fall of 1987 added 6'10" Clay Buckley to the frontcourt, 6'4" Joe Cook as the deep-bench guard from Lincoln, Illinois, and a number of other freshmen. Buckley was the tallest member of the class. He arrived in Durham in the fall of 1987 a Conestoga all-time scoring and rebounding record-holder, a Philadelphia-area Catholic-school-killing post player, and a full-scholarship Duke big man at the start of one of the most consequential four-year arcs the program has ever produced.
At Duke
Clay Buckley's four years at Duke produced a record that, viewed against the program's history, looks almost mythological. He arrived in 1987 and never missed a Final Four. The 1988 Duke team — led by senior Danny Ferry, junior Tommy Amaker, and the freshman class around Buckley — won the ACC regular season, beat Temple in the East Regional Final, and reached the Final Four in Kansas City. Buckley played 20 games as a freshman, averaged 4.6 minutes a game, and shot a wildly efficient 9-of-15 from the field for 60% on a small sample that suggested the post-game he had brought from Conestoga still worked against ACC-caliber defense. Duke lost the national semifinal 66-59 to a Larry Brown Kansas team led by Danny Manning, and the Jayhawks would win the national title two nights later.
The 1989 Duke team improved on the freshman class's growth. Quin Snyder was a sophomore. Phil Henderson was a sophomore. Christian Laettner was a freshman that fall. Robert Brickey was a fifth-year senior. Brian Davis and Crawford Palmer were the other big freshmen behind Buckley in his sophomore class. The team went 28-8, won the ACC regular season, and again reached the Final Four. Buckley played in 30 of the team's 36 games as a sophomore, averaged 4.7 minutes a game, and shot an extraordinary 70.6% from the field — 24 made baskets on 34 attempts. The 1989 season ended in Seattle's Kingdome with Duke losing the Final Four semifinal in overtime to a Seton Hall team led by Andrew Gaze. Two Final Fours, no titles. Buckley was 20 years old.
The 1990 season was the season that would haunt the program until April 1991. Duke went 29-9, won the East Regional Final on Christian Laettner's first famous buzzer-beater against Connecticut, and reached the 1990 national championship game in Denver — where UNLV thrashed them 103-73, the largest margin of defeat in title-game history. Buckley had played 17 games during the regular season as a junior, averaged 6.6 minutes a game, and shot 78.9% from the free throw line. He had now played in three consecutive Final Fours. He had now lost a national title game by 30 points. He was twenty-one years old. The 1990-91 season would be his last.
What happened in the 1990-91 season is by now one of the most documented stories in college basketball history. Coach K's team came back from the Las Vegas humiliation, beat UNC at the Smith Center on UNC's Senior Day with the seniors Buckley and Greg Koubek finishing their careers 3-1 at the Dean Dome in a career-capping 83-77 win, lost the ACC Tournament Final 96-74 to that same UNC team a week later, and then began the NCAA Tournament as the No. 2 seed in the Midwest Region. They beat Northeast Louisiana, Iowa, Connecticut, and St. John's to reach the Final Four in Indianapolis. The semifinal was a rematch with the same UNLV team that had beaten them by 30 points the previous April. Coach K had a week to prepare for it.
What is sometimes overlooked in the story of Duke's 79-77 upset of UNLV on March 30, 1991 is what the week of preparation looked like for Coach K's program. Coach K had a scout team to prepare his starters against UNLV's actual playing style. The scout team needed someone who could play the role of UNLV's 6'10" center George Ackles. The job of pretending to be Ackles for an entire week of practice — running UNLV's offense, jamming up Duke's interior on the defensive end, simulating the Rebels' physicality — fell to senior 6'10" Duke center Clay Buckley. Buckley told the Insidenova reporter years later that Coach K had a week to prepare them, and that the plan worked. The plan worked: Duke beat UNLV 79-77. Two nights later they beat Kansas 72-65 in Indianapolis. Mike Krzyzewski had his first national championship. Clay Buckley, senior captain on that team, was an NCAA national champion. He had played in 19 games during his senior regular season, made 1 start, averaged 4.9 minutes a game, and shot 55.6% from the field. He had spent his college career playing in four consecutive Final Fours, two consecutive title games, and walking off the Hoosier Dome floor on the night of April 1, 1991 with a championship ring he had earned, in real measurable basketball terms, more than the 27 senior-year points he had scored would have suggested. He had played George Ackles for a week. Coach K's plan had worked because the scout team had worked. The senior captain had earned his ring.
After Duke
Clay Buckley graduated from Duke in the spring of 1991 with a degree, an NCAA national championship ring, and an undocumented but earned reputation as one of the more grown-up members of a roster that included some of the most prodigious individual talents the program had ever recruited. He went directly into the working world. He took a marketing job in New York with MVBMS Advertising. He enrolled in business school at Georgetown and earned his MBA from McDonough. He moved into technology operations during the dot-com expansion of the late 1990s, joining America Online — the Northern Virginia–based internet pioneer — as a corporate vice president during the AOL Time Warner era.
When AOL's internal trajectory slowed in the mid-2000s, Buckley transitioned to senior operations roles at companies in the consumer protection and retail-services world. He spent the late 2000s as a Corporate Officer and Principal at N.E.W. Customer Service Companies LLC, the Sterling, Virginia–based buyer-protection and product-support firm that had been founded in 1983 and was processing service contracts for major American retailers. In May 2010, he took the Chief Revenue Officer role at TechForward, Inc., the Los Angeles–based consumer electronics buyback firm.
Around the same time, Clay Buckley was raising a family in McLean, Virginia, where he had settled with his wife and children. His daughter Ellie was playing high school basketball at Langley High School, the public school in McLean whose girls' basketball program, under head coach Amanda Baker, had been on a slow steady climb toward becoming a regional and state contender. Clay Buckley joined Baker's coaching staff as an assistant. He has been on her bench for years, helping the Saxons grow into a perennial Conference 6, region, and state contender. He has also coached youth basketball in McLean — the McLean Maniacs 11-Under team, the Matrix AAU Basketball 2017 Green-Buckley team — at age levels where the players are not yet thinking about D-I scholarships and where the coaching is mostly about teaching the game and the joy of playing it.
Where Is He Now
The most evocative single piece of Clay Buckley's post-Duke life ran in the Washington Post on January 14, 2015. Langley's girls' team was preparing for a Tuesday-night home game against No. 13 Madison and the Madison center, a 6'2" Virginia Tech commit named Kelly Koshuta who was averaging better than 23 points per game and who routinely received double teams. Langley head coach Amanda Baker wanted her team to be ready for what triple-teaming Koshuta would actually look like in practice. There was no Langley player who could play the role of Kelly Koshuta. There was, however, an assistant coach on the bench whose daughter was an injured Langley forward and who happened to be 6'10". Clay Buckley, age 46, put on shoes. He spent the week of practice running Madison's offense from the high post against the Langley defense, posting up on the block, drawing the triple teams that Langley's defense needed to learn to navigate. The Saxons played Madison on Tuesday night. They held Koshuta to 14 points. Langley won 36-33. The Washington Post reporter, Sam Fortier, opened the story with Clay Buckley making the explicit comparison to his week of scout-team work in March 1991 against the Duke starters as the stand-in for UNLV's George Ackles. The plan, in both cases, had worked. The Brotherhood Coach K built apparently teaches you how to be a useful body in practice when your team needs one, twenty-five years and two thousand miles apart.
Clay Buckley is, today, the founder and President of CauseNetwork, Inc., a McLean, Virginia–based marketplace-for-giving startup that he launched with co-founders Mike Rowen and Glen Gulyas. CauseNetwork's mobile app and online platform allow consumers to do their normal everyday online shopping at over a thousand national brands and have a percentage of every purchase routed to one of more than 150 causes — America's VetDogs, the American Parkinson Disease Association, United Cerebral Palsy, the Autism Community in Action, the Alzheimer's Association Walk to End Alzheimer's, Defenders of Wildlife, Special Olympics, the MedEvac Foundation International, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Latino Student Fund. The platform has been profiled on the Discovery Channel. Buckley told a Q Virginia interviewer that the idea behind CauseNetwork is that most people who want to support a cause cannot afford to write another check, but they can change their shopping behavior to benefit a cause they support — that the platform reconnects causes with their supporters through everyday purchases.
The shape of Clay Buckley's post-Duke career maps so cleanly onto the shape of the lessons a senior captain on a Coach K championship team would have brought into the working world that it is almost embarrassing to point it out. The scout-team mentality became the assistant-coach role at his daughter's high school. The four consecutive Final Fours became a career rising through AOL, N.E.W. Customer Service Companies, and TechForward. The 1991 national championship became, eventually, a startup that has turned his name and his Duke connections into a platform raising money for a thousand causes that need it. In 2020, near the bottom of the COVID-19 pandemic, an unannounced package arrived at Clay Buckley's McLean front door. The return address read Durham, North Carolina. Inside was a framed photo of the 1991 Duke team being honored by President George H.W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle in the White House Rose Garden, with a handwritten note from Mike Krzyzewski. The senior captain who had played George Ackles for a week so that Duke's starters could beat UNLV had been remembered, twenty-nine years later, by the head coach whose plan had worked. The Brotherhood, when properly understood, is not only the All-Americans and the lottery picks. It is also the surprise package on the front porch in the middle of a pandemic. Clay Buckley earned his.