Kevin Strickland came up out of Mt. Airy, North Carolina - the small Surry County mountain town in the Blue Ridge foothills that the rest of America knows as the inspiration for Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show, and that the basketball world of the early 1980s knew because Mt. Airy's North Surry High School had a 6'5" forward who could play. Kevin Strickland scored 2,000 points at North Surry High and was named a prep All-American by the time he graduated in the spring of 1984. The single most retold story of his high-school career, by the people who played against him in the rural-North-Carolina playoff circuit, is from the 1983 NCHSAA 3A West Region championship game between North Surry and A.L. Brown, played at Hickory High School in March 1983. Strickland was a junior. A.L. Brown's Shelwyn Klutz was assigned to guard him. The Wonders won 54-49. Klutz outscored Strickland 15 to 12. But, as Klutz would tell the Salisbury Post 37 years later upon his 2020 retirement as A.L. Brown's head basketball coach, Strickland took off once almost from the foul line and tomahawk-dunked on one of Klutz's teammates - the kind of thing, in Klutz's framing, that you never forget. The college coaches were watching. By the spring of 1984, Kevin Strickland was signed to Duke.
The Duke he signed with in the spring of 1984 was Coach Mike Krzyzewski's fourth recruiting class, the team that was just then announcing itself as a top-ten national program. The junior class he would be joining was the Johnny Dawkins / Mark Alarie / Jay Bilas / David Henderson group that had reached the 1984 NCAA Sweet Sixteen as sophomores and would, the next year as seniors, reach the 1986 national title game. Kevin Strickland arrived at Duke in October 1984 a 6'5" forward who had been tomahawk-dunking on people in the Carolina mountain playoffs and who was about to discover that the level of competition in Cameron Indoor Stadium was such that a freshman year of 9.3 minutes per game and 4.0 points per game on 58.3 percent shooting from the floor - the role-player line he would produce in 1984-85 - was, in fact, an excellent freshman year. The Mayberry kid had reached the Coach K program. He was nineteen years old.