In Gdynia, Poland, on December 23, 1989, Aleksander "Olek" Czyż was born into a country that was, at that exact week of human history, in the middle of becoming a different country than it had been for forty-five years. The Berlin Wall had fallen six weeks earlier. Lech Wałęsa had just been on the cover of every Western newsmagazine. The Solidarity government in Poland was navigating its first peaceful, non-Communist months. Olek was born into the new Polish republic. His childhood would be lived inside the country's first generation of post-Soviet freedom — and his basketball life would unfold, eventually, on the other side of an ocean, in the Northern Nevada desert.
He started playing basketball in Poland at age 10. By age 14, the family had moved to Reno, Nevada, in 2003 or 2004. Northern Nevada in those years was a basketball-quiet corner of the country — the Reno Huskies of Reno High School were the local power, and the AAU circuit was modest. But Olek was 6'7", with the kind of explosive athletic ability that doesn't need a basketball-rich environment to be noticed. At eighteen, he would record a 44.5-inch vertical jump in front of Duke's strength-and-conditioning staff — a number more typical of NBA combine athletes than college freshmen. He won the Wild West Tournament Slam Dunk Contest three times.
The basketball came together at Reno High School under the Huskies program. As a sophomore in 2005-06, he averaged 10 points and 6 rebounds per game and was a key role player on a Reno team that won the Nevada 4A state championship. As a junior, he was a starter. As a senior in 2007-08, he was the centerpiece — averaging 20 points and 10 rebounds per game, named first-team all-state, leading Reno to a 26-6 record. In the 4A state semifinal he posted 25 points, 13 rebounds, and three blocks in a win over Foothill. In the state championship game against Cheyenne, he posted 18 points and 10 rebounds in a 76-72 win that gave Reno High its second state title in his three varsity seasons — and gave Czyż his second state-championship ring before his eighteenth birthday. The Huskies had gone 77-18 with him on the roster, including 38-4 in conference play.
The recruiting attention was intense. He was named to the 2008 Under Armour Capital Classic — a senior all-star showcase in Washington, D.C. — and won Most Valuable Player of the 35th annual edition of the event, scoring a game-high 23 points on 9-of-14 shooting with 9 rebounds, 2 assists, and a blocked shot to lead the U.S. All-Stars to a 123-85 win over the Capital All-Stars. He scored 32 points in the ninth annual Fallon Optimist All-Star Classic. He was ranked No. 79 in the country by Rivals.com, named a top-100 prospect, four-star by every major recruiting service. He had scholarship offers from Florida, Louisville, and many others.
He committed to Duke.
The Krzyzewski choice carried a kind of poetic weight that other Duke commitments did not. Mike Krzyzewski was the most famous Polish-American basketball coach in history — the son of a Polish Chicago elevator operator named Władysław Krzyżewski, the grandson of immigrants who had come to America from a country that did not exist on any pre-1918 map. Krzyzewski had grown up in a Polish neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago. He had attended St. Helen's Catholic School and St. Helen's Polish Catholic Parish. He had spoken Polish at home. His mother had famously made pierogi for the Duke team during his early Durham years. Krzyzewski recruiting Olek Czyż meant something — to Czyż's family in Gdynia, to the small Polish-American basketball community in the United States, and to the recruiting press, which made much of the cultural connection at the time of the announcement. Czyż chose Duke over Florida and Louisville. He arrived in Durham in fall 2008 as the first Polish-born scholarship recruit Krzyzewski had landed at Duke.