In Shelburne, Vermont — a Lake Champlain town of about 7,500 people fifteen minutes south of Burlington — the Caldbeck household in the 1980s had a particular way of being. The parents were Diane Schweitzer and Gareth Caldbeck, both attorneys. The family had means. The kids went to private schools and to the movies and weren't worried about how college would get paid for. Justin Caldbeck was the older of two boys. He was born and raised in a small town that knew its local lawyers, and he grew up tall, athletic, and a basketball obsessive in a place where college basketball was a TV-only sport. His heroes were Larry Bird (the closest thing Vermont had to a regional NBA hero) and a 6-foot-2 Duke guard from Washington D.C. named Johnny Dawkins — the first ACC Player of the Year in Duke history, the centerpiece of Coach K's first Final Four team in 1986. Justin watched Dawkins on television and decided Duke basketball was the goal.
He went to Rice Memorial High School in South Burlington, a Catholic college-prep school that put more of its graduates into competitive colleges than into competitive athletic programs. Caldbeck was a multi-sport athlete who held leadership positions on each of his teams. He was inducted into Rice Memorial's Athletic Hall of Fame for basketball. His high school stat lines were excellent for a Vermont program; they were also nothing that any Division I coach in the country was going to look at twice. There was no AAU showcase circuit pipeline running from Vermont to Tobacco Road in 1995. There was no recruiting attention. There was, as he later put it in an SF Examiner essay, "a kid in Vermont dreaming of playing at the professional level" and a realistic understanding that the path to that dream did not run through being recruited to a major Division I program.
He went to Duke anyway, fall of 1995. He went as a regular student. Eighteen years old, just under 6-foot-3, an Economics major. He did not arrive on a basketball scholarship. He did not arrive on a recruiting visit. He arrived the way every Duke freshman who has never been promised anything arrives — by getting in academically, packing the car, driving south down I-95, and walking onto a campus where everyone was a stranger. And the first thing he did was knock on the door of Cameron Indoor Stadium and ask if he could be a basketball student manager.