Jim Corrigan

At Duke

The Duke he walked into in the fall of 1976 was about to become one of the best teams in the country, and there was no room on it for a 5-foot-11 guard from Winston-Salem. So for three years Corrigan played on Duke's junior varsity, a team that practiced at 6 a.m. and played 13 to 15 games a season.

"You played because you loved the game," he said. "We practiced at 6 a.m. each day and played 13-15 games per year. But those were great guys."

While he was getting up in the dark, the varsity was making history down the hall. In his sophomore year Duke won the ACC Tournament and reached the national championship game against Kentucky. As a junior he watched a team ranked No. 1 in the preseason lose in the ACC final and in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. He was a student through all of it and a member of none of it.

Then, before his senior season, Bill Foster gave him a scholarship and a place on the varsity.

The 1979-80 team was Gminski's last and Foster's last, a team that rose to No. 1 in the polls during the season, slumped to 7-7 in the ACC and then won the conference tournament anyway, beating NC State, North Carolina and Maryland in three days in Greensboro. In the NCAA Tournament it beat Penn and then top-seeded Kentucky, 55-54, at Rupp Arena before losing to Purdue in the Mideast Regional final.

Corrigan's part in it was small and, in its way, perfect. He played in nine games for a total of 22 minutes. He took one shot from the field and made it. He went to the free-throw line twice and made both. He finished his Duke career with four points, three assists, one rebound and one steal, and he did not miss.

The program gave him something the box score couldn't. At the end of the season he received the Ted Mann Award, given to the non-starter who contributed the most to team morale. He graduated cum laude in 1980 with a degree in management science, the same spring his school's new coach-to-be, a 33-year-old from Army named Mike Krzyzewski, was hired to replace Foster.

Looking back, Corrigan thought those years taught him more than he realized at the time. In high school he had played for three different coaches, and at Duke he played for four, between the jayvees and the varsity. He had spent four years watching how different men ran a practice.

After Duke

He did not plan to coach. His father wanted him to get an MBA. Corrigan wasn't sure, so he stayed in Durham and took two part-time jobs, selling real estate during the day and working at Darryl's restaurant at night.

Then Kevin Billerman called. Billerman had played at Duke in the mid-1970s, come home from playing overseas and been hired as head coach at Northern Durham High School, and he asked Corrigan to help him as a volunteer assistant. Corrigan stayed two seasons. "A career was born," GoDuke wrote years later, and it was hard to argue.

He went home to Bishop McGuinness, coached the junior varsity for a year and took over the varsity in 1983. In four seasons there he went 90-42 and took the school to three straight state finals. The 1985 and 1986 teams finished as state runners-up. The 1987 team won it all. He was conference coach of the year three times and the 1986 state coach of the year.

Another Duke connection took him to college basketball. Chuck Swenson, who had been on Krzyzewski's staff, was the new head coach at William and Mary, and he brought Corrigan to Williamsburg in 1987, first as a graduate assistant and then as a full-time assistant. They spent seven seasons together. In 1994 Jeff Capel, whose son Jeff Capel III was then starring at Duke, hired Corrigan at Old Dominion in Norfolk.

He stayed 19 years on the ODU men's staff, the last five as associate head coach, under Capel and then Blaine Taylor. With Taylor the Monarchs won 28 games in 2004-05, the most in school history. During his years on the staff they won five Colonial Athletic Association championships, made six NCAA Tournaments and won the first CollegeInsider.com Tournament, in 2009. Bleacher Report listed him among the 15 best assistant coaches in the country. Fox Sports' Jeff Goodman called him the best assistant in the CAA. He recruited players from Australia, Lithuania, the Ivory Coast, Canada, Finland and Denmark. He also wanted his own program, and said so.

In February 2013 he got eight games of one. ODU was 2-20 and had lost 10 straight when it fired Taylor, and Corrigan was named interim head coach for the rest of a season in which the Monarchs, on their way to Conference USA, were barred from the CAA Tournament. There was nothing left to play for, and the team played hard anyway. ODU won at Drexel, 78-66, in his first game, then lost to league-leading Northeastern in overtime and by two at Delaware. When ODU routed UNC Wilmington, 84-61, for its first home win in 102 days, Corrigan gave the credit away. "They came out and played hard tonight," he said, "and (I'm) glad to see them get rewarded, because we've been playing really hard every time out."

Athletic director Wood Selig watched his debut from three rows behind the bench. "He was in his element," Selig said. "He was where he was born to be. He was born to coach a basketball team." Corrigan's father, by then in chemotherapy for lung cancer, saw him coach as a head coach too. "We actually won that game," Corrigan said. "That was really cool. But dad was always supportive of what I did and my journey."

ODU went 3-5 under him and hired Jeff Jones. Corrigan was not surprised, and he did not want to leave Norfolk, where his sons were in school. That June, Selig called with another idea: an assistant's job with women's coach Karen Barefoot. He showed up to meet her in a coat and tie. "That was classy," Barefoot said. "That said a lot to me." She called Elon athletic director Dave Blank, Corrigan's old roommate at Duke, to ask about him. "He's such a great fundamental coach," she said later. "He really does a good job of making our girls understand the game. He's so good at scouting. He can take an opponent and really break them down."

He learned the women's game the way he had learned everything, by asking. He spent nearly an hour on the phone with Virginia Tech's Dennis Wolff, who had made the same move. "There are significant differences," Corrigan said. "But the girls compete just as hard as the guys. They want to win just like guys. They want to improve... just like guys. I think the way you make that happen is different."

That first season was the hardest of his life. On January 2, 2014, the Lady Monarchs were getting off the bus in Durham for practice before a game at Duke when his sister called and told him to come home. Barefoot told him to go and stay as long as he needed. Four days later he was at his father's side in Winston-Salem when he died. "You can't minimize what Karen did for me," Corrigan said. "A lot of coaches would have said go after the game or we need you back as soon as possible. I can't begin to tell you what it meant to be with my father, with my family."

He coached four seasons on the ODU women's staff, with WNIT trips in 2014 and 2015, and on his own résumé he lists the development of Jennie Simms, who became a three-time first-team All-Conference USA guard, the league's 2017 Player of the Year and a WNBA draft pick. Then he lost that job in a coaching change in 2017, and for the first time since 1980 it looked as if he would sit a season out. Instead Duke played in Norfolk just before Thanksgiving, and the game led to a meeting with Joanne P. McCallie, who needed help after the retirement of her longtime assistant Al Brown. He joined her staff in December 2017 as a special assistant and was promoted to assistant coach in 2019. "Jim has been a special addition to our staff," McCallie said. "His work ethic, technical knowledge of the game, experience in all areas, loyalty, and eagerness to recruit the best student-athletes to Duke makes him enormously valuable."

Where Is He Now

In June 2020 Duke's website ran a feature on him with the headline "Corrigan Enjoying Being Back Home at Duke." The 2019-20 team had finished third in the ACC before the pandemic cancelled the postseason, and he was 62 and back on the campus where he had once gotten up at dawn to play for the jayvees.

"It is a long and winding road, but it is awesome to be back in a place that I love and be part of a program with a great tradition," he said. "It is very exciting to be back and it is hard to believe I am back at Duke."

The road turned one more time almost immediately. McCallie left after the season, Duke hired Kara Lawson that July, and Lawson brought in her own assistants. Corrigan was not among them. Forty straight seasons on high school and college benches, from a volunteer's whistle at Northern Durham to the ACC, ended in an ordinary change of regime. His three children, Keenan, a Duke graduate, and Cole and Drew, who both went to Old Dominion, were grown.

He did not leave the game for long. He went back to Hampton Roads, where he had spent 23 years at Old Dominion, and in March 2022 he started as a part-time player development coach at Excel Basketball Academy, a training gym on Laskin Road in Virginia Beach that runs private skills sessions, weekly workouts and summer camps. The academy's biography of him runs from the Duke varsity to the state title at McGuinness, William and Mary, Old Dominion and back to Duke. "Jim brings years of high-level coaching experience to the players of EXCEL to help them achieve their full potential," it says.

That December a college program called one more time. Virginia Tech brought him on as a part-time special assistant for about two months. The Hokies' coach was Kenny Brooks, whose words Corrigan had remembered in 2014 as he crossed over to the women's game: Brooks, who had made the same move, told him he would never go back to men's basketball. That spring Virginia Tech reached the first Final Four in its history.

On his own LinkedIn page he describes himself now as "Coach, Teacher, and Developer of People!!" Whether he chose to step away from full-time college coaching or simply never found the next job he wanted, he has not said publicly, as far as we can find.

He never got the program of his own that he wanted so openly in 2014. "I want to be a head coach, to have my own program, to have a chance to build a successful, winning program," he said then. "Whether it's men's or women's basketball is not a big issue for me. I just want to coach." For 40 years in high school and college gyms, he did, and he is still doing it in a smaller one. By the end at Duke, he said, the scoreboard had stopped being the point: "At this point in my career, I just want to impact a kid's life or make a difference." At a training academy, that is the whole job.

On the day ODU fired Taylor, Corrigan gathered his staff and told them to make the most of the eight games in front of them, because even if things did not work out, you never know who else is watching. It is the kind of thing a man learns at 6 a.m. jayvee practices. He spent three years at Duke playing for nobody's attention, and when people finally were watching, he went 1-for-1.

If you played for Jim Corrigan at McGuinness, William and Mary, Old Dominion, Duke or Excel, we would love to hear your story.