Jon Weingart's path to Duke basketball began, by his own retelling four decades later for the JHU Hub magazine, in a high school study hall. His father was a doctor - a neurologist by specialty - and medicine had always been a possibility for the son. The college application process in the late 1970s was, by his framing, much simpler than what subsequent generations of applicants would face. Jon had applied to four schools: the University of Virginia, a school in Ohio, and a couple of others. He was sitting in study hall one day when the kid across the table flipped him a Duke application that the classmate had decided not to fill out. Jon filled it out instead. He knew Duke had just lost to Kentucky in the 1978 NCAA national championship game. He knew Duke was a good school. He had, by his own admission, zero idea where Durham was. He sent the application in. He was admitted.
The basketball connection came on a parallel track. Jon had played high school basketball with the kind of competitive ability that drew a Division I recruiting overture. In the late 1970s, the West Point assistant coach who had been promoted to head coach of the Army Black Knights was a thirty-year-old former Bobby Knight player named Mike Krzyzewski. Coach K, then the head coach at the United States Military Academy, had expressed interest in Jon going to West Point to play basketball there. Jon was not interested in the military. He turned down the West Point recruiting overture. He went to Duke instead.
The freshman year at Duke, 1979-80, Jon played JV basketball under head coach Bill Foster. The varsity team that season - Mike Gminski, Jim Spanarkel-less, the Gene Banks/Kenny Dennard/Vince Taylor core - made the Elite Eight, losing to Purdue in the regional final. Jon was on the JV roster, working on his game and his classroom load. He was a pre-medical student playing JV basketball at one of the best academic programs in the ACC, with the Foster-era Final Four banners still hanging from the rafters of Cameron Indoor Stadium.
And then, in March 1980, Bill Foster departed Duke for South Carolina. Athletic director Tom Butters hired a thirty-three-year-old replacement: Mike Krzyzewski, the same head coach who had been recruiting Jon to West Point one year earlier. Coach K's first Duke recruiting class was being built. Jon Weingart, a Duke sophomore by October 1980, was on the varsity roster. The basketball coach who had wanted to recruit him to play at Army was now the head coach of the team he was on at Duke. He got to play for Coach K his sophomore year - the kind of coincidence that, four decades later, Jon would still find incredibly fortuitous when he was telling the story.