Road to Duke
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.
At Duke
Kevin Strickland's freshman year, 1984-85, was a 23-8 Duke season that ended with a Sweet Sixteen loss to Boston College and a top-ten national finish. He played in twenty-seven of the team's thirty-one games. He shot 58.3 percent from the floor on 84 attempts. He scored 108 points, a lot of them in the kind of garbage-time end-of-game minutes that freshman role players score points in. He was learning. He stayed at Duke.
His sophomore year, 1985-86, was the Duke season that defined an era. Johnny Dawkins, Mark Alarie, Jay Bilas, David Henderson, and Tommy Amaker as the freshman backup point guard. The team went 37-3, won the ACC regular season at 12-2, won the ACC Tournament, won the NCAA East Region, and reached the 1986 national title game at Reunion Arena in Dallas. They lost 72-69 to Denny Crum's Louisville Cardinals. Kevin Strickland was a sophomore role player on that team - 32 games, 7.6 minutes per, 2.1 points per. He was on the floor for the Sweet Sixteen win over DePaul, for the Elite Eight win over Navy, for the Final Four semifinal win over Kansas. He was on the bench for the Louisville loss. The senior class graduated en masse. The 1986-87 team would be his junior year, and the Duke program was about to find out what the next generation - Strickland, Tommy Amaker as senior point guard, sophomore Danny Ferry, sophomore Billy King, sophomore Kevin Strickland's class - could do.
His junior year, 1986-87, was the first season of the three-point line in college basketball. Kevin Strickland's role exploded. Coach K moved him into the starting lineup for 19 of the 31 games and gave him 26 minutes a night. He averaged 11.5 points and 4.6 rebounds. He shot 46 percent from the floor and 81.4 percent from the line. And, on the most important new dimension of the 1986-87 college basketball season - the three-point line, the rule change that was about to transform the sport - Kevin Strickland made 36 threes on 92 attempts for a 39.1 percent stroke. He was Duke's best three-point shooter. The team went 24-9, won the ACC regular season, reached the Sweet Sixteen, and lost 88-82 to Bob Knight's Indiana team that would go on to win the national championship in New Orleans two weeks later. Tommy Amaker won the inaugural National Defensive Player of the Year award. Kevin Strickland had become a real college basketball player.
His senior year, 1987-88, was his career year and Duke's first Final Four under Coach K of the modern dynasty1 era. Strickland started thirty-four of the team's thirty-five games. He played 29.6 minutes a night. He averaged 16.1 points and 4.5 rebounds. He shot 52.7 percent from the floor, 36.9 percent from three, and 80.8 percent from the free-throw line. He scored 565 total points that senior year. He was named team captain. He passed the thousand-point career-scoring mark, finishing with 1,095 total points across four Duke seasons. The team went 28-7, won the ACC regular season, won the East Region of the NCAA Tournament, and reached the Final Four in Kansas City. They lost 66-59 to Larry Brown's Kansas Jayhawks in the national semifinal. Danny Manning, who had played against Kevin Strickland for all four of their college careers, was the difference - he scored 25 points, grabbed 10 rebounds, blocked 6 shots, picked off 4 steals, and added 2 assists to beat Duke, then he scored 31 points with 18 rebounds against Oklahoma in the title game two nights later to win the national championship. Kevin Strickland walked off the floor of Kemper Arena in Kansas City a Duke captain who had just played his last college basketball game. He had been to two Final Fours. He had been on a national title-game team as a sophomore role player and on a Final Four team as a starting senior captain. He had scored a thousand points at Duke. The dynasty1 era's first Final Four team had walked off the floor under his captaincy.
After Duke
The 1988 CBA draft, held that summer, was one of the deeper years in CBA history. The Continental Basketball Association was, in 1988, the most credible American minor league of professional basketball. Phil Jackson had coached the Albany Patroons to a CBA championship in 1984 before moving on to assistant duties with the Chicago Bulls in 1987. The Patroons drafted Kevin Strickland in the fourth round, the forty-first pick overall. Strickland would not catch on as an NBA regular - the league in 1988 carried only twelve roster spots per team, the three-point line was four years old, and the open style of basketball Strickland's career would later flourish in had not yet arrived in the American professional game. He pivoted overseas.
Across the early-to-mid 1990s, Kevin Strickland built a substantial career in French professional basketball, primarily at the second-division Élite 2 level. He played at Sceaux, the suburban Paris club, for the 1990-91 and 1991-92 seasons. In a December 22, 1990 game against Lorient, he scored 37 points, grabbed 4 rebounds, dished 3 assists, and blocked 4 shots - the four blocks tying his career high. The next season, on October 5, 1991, in a 112-91 Sceaux home win against Saint-Brieuc, he set a personal career mark - 54 points on 20-of-27 from inside the arc, 2-of-5 from three, and 8-of-9 from the line, finishing the night with a 54-efficiency rating that would be the highest of his French career. Less than a month later, on November 2, 1991, in a Sceaux home win against Nantes, he set a career-high in assists with 10, paired with 35 points and 7 rebounds. He moved on to Tours, another Élite 2 club, in the mid-1990s. On October 11, 1994, in a road win at Angers, he tied his career-high rebound total with 12 alongside 28 points. On December 22, 1995, in a road loss at Brest, he set his career-high in steals with 9 alongside another 28-point night. The basketball career that had begun with a tomahawk dunk in a Hickory, North Carolina high-school regional final in March 1983 was, twelve years later, still producing 28-point nights for a small French club playing seventy-five-game seasons in front of a few thousand French basketball fans.
His later French-career stops included Saint-Brieuc Basket Cotes D'Armor in the French Regional League. The Eurobasket profile of his career, the most comprehensive public record of his overseas play, lists Saint-Brieuc as the most recent club. The Kevin Strickland who had been a 6'5" Mt. Airy kid the city of Mt. Airy still remembered for the Andy Griffith Show town and the basketball player who had played college ball against Danny Manning had become, in the second half of his playing career, a recognizable name in French basketball circles.
Where Is He Now
Kevin Strickland's life in the years since his French basketball career ended is, in the open record of public sources, more private than his Duke years. He has been the subject of birthday acknowledgments from the Duke Men's Basketball Twitter account. He has been the subject of a 2020 Mt. Airy News bracket piece that framed his last college game - the 1988 Final Four loss to Danny Manning's Kansas - as a defining North Carolina basketball moment. He has been the subject of a 2020 Salisbury Post retirement profile of A.L. Brown's longtime head coach Shelwyn Klutz, in which the tomahawk dunk from the 1983 3A West Region championship game was retold one more time as the highlight reel of an opposing player Klutz had spent the rest of his life remembering.
Bleacher Report's 2014 list of the top fifty Duke basketball players in school history ranked Kevin Strickland by name, framing him as a key contributor to two Final Four teams across his four years at Duke - the kind of Duke career that, by the framing of the Bleacher Report piece, averaged 13.8 points and 4.6 rebounds across the junior and senior years, captained the 1988 Final Four team, and went over sixteen points per game as a senior. The framing is correct. Kevin Strickland's place in Duke basketball history is the place of the bridge captain - the senior who had been on the bench for the 1986 title game and was the captain of the 1988 team that began the modern Coach K Final Four era. Coach K's first Final Four was Kevin Strickland's last college game.
The Brotherhood, as Kevin Strickland has lived it, runs from a Mt. Airy, North Carolina living room where a kid was sitting on the floor watching Andy Griffith reruns and dreaming about basketball, to the Hickory High School gymnasium where, as a North Surry junior in March 1983, he tomahawk-dunked over a defender in a regional championship game in the Blue Ridge foothills, to four years in Cameron Indoor Stadium under Mike Krzyzewski during the program's foundational climb, to the Carrier Dome and the New Orleans Superdome and Kemper Arena and the other big-arena cathedrals of late-1980s American college basketball, to the second-division French gymnasiums of the 1990s where he scored 54 points in a Sceaux home game against Saint-Brieuc on a cold October 1991 night. The Brotherhood is the path. The North Carolina kid who could tomahawk-dunk became the Coach K senior captain who scored a thousand points at Duke and went to two Final Fours and started Coach K's first Final Four era. The Andy Griffith town produced one of the most underrated bridge contributors of the early Coach K dynasty. Kevin Strickland was, at the height of his Duke senior year, a 16-points-per-game three-point shooting captain on the 1988 Final Four team. The line on his Sports-Reference career page reads 1,095 total points. The line of the Brotherhood reads further than that. He was Captain. He started Coach K's first Final Four era.