The Donahue Douglas Investment Group, the alternative asset management firm Doug McNeely co-founded in 2024, tells the story this way on its website: McNeely, it says, holds "the distinction of being legendary Coach Mike Krzyzewski's first recruit." That's the corporate bio talking, written in 2024 about a kid who arrived in Durham forty-four years earlier, but the timeline holds up. Mike Krzyzewski was hired as Duke's head coach in March 1980. Doug McNeely arrived on campus the following fall. Whatever recruiting calls Krzyzewski made in his first months on the job — and there could not have been many — McNeely was on the receiving end of one of them.
Before that call, the player on the other end of the line was a 6-foot-5 guard-forward from Eastwood High School in El Paso, Texas, where he played for head coach Bobby Lesley. A January 1980 El Paso Times preview of an Eastwood Troopers district game described McNeely and a teammate as two players who "probably jump as well as any two" in the area, and Lesley's Eastwood teams were built around exactly that kind of athleticism. McNeely alternated between forward and guard in the Eastwood lineup — too long to hide on the perimeter, too bouncy to pin down in the post. The Troopers were on an eight-game winning streak that week, and Lesley was counting on him, alongside senior Fred Wofford and junior Steve Carpenter, to push the streak to nine.
El Paso in 1980 was not a Tobacco Road recruiting destination. The city sits closer to San Diego than to Dallas and exists on its own basketball island, separated from the rest of Texas by hundreds of miles of desert. The best players in the region usually stayed regional — UTEP, New Mexico, Texas Tech, Arizona. Duke's recruiting footprint in 1980 barely extended past the Mid-Atlantic. For a kid from West Texas to end up in Durham required someone at Duke to make a call that nobody else at the ACC level was making.
Here is where the timing gets interesting. McNeely was originally recruited under Bill Foster, the head coach who had taken Duke to the 1978 national championship game behind Mike Gminski, Jim Spanarkel, and Gene Banks. Foster was in charge through the spring of 1980, when McNeely would have been finishing his senior year at Eastwood. Then, in March, Foster left for South Carolina. Athletic director Tom Butters needed a new coach in a hurry. He went to West Point and hired a 33-year-old Army lieutenant colonel named Mike Krzyzewski, a name almost no one in Durham could pronounce. Krzyzewski had a few months to figure out what kind of program he was inheriting and what kind of players he could still get on the phone before the fall. McNeely was one of those calls. According to the bio Doug himself signs off on today, that call made him the first player Krzyzewski ever recruited to Duke.