Road to Duke
Anyone who has played much pickup basketball has come across this guy: he's slow, possibly pudgy, can't really jump, and is someone you pick because you need another body. Then he gets on the court and you realize no one can stop him. He's so wide or so smart about angles that no one can get close to his shot. He can't keep up on the break, but he somehow forces the game to play at his pace. Ryan Young was that guy — except he did it in the ACC.
Born on December 2, 1999, in Montreal, Quebec, Young grew up in Stewartsville, New Jersey, in a family built on college athletics. His mother Tammy played volleyball at Syracuse; his father Patrick rowed crew there. The sport they raised their son on was basketball, and by his senior year at Bethlehem Catholic High School in Pennsylvania, he was averaging 16.3 points and 12.3 rebounds per game — leading the Becahi Golden Hawks to their first district title and state semifinal appearance in school history. He was named Eastern Pennsylvania Conference Player of the Year, USA TODAY first-team all-state, and The Morning Call Player of the Year. On the AAU circuit, he played with the Jersey Shore Warriors, capturing six tournament championships.
He wasn't a five-star recruit. He wasn't a top-100 prospect. He committed to Northwestern, where Chris Collins — a former Duke captain himself — was building something in Evanston. Young redshirted his first year, then started all 31 games as a redshirt freshman, averaging 9 points and 6.1 rebounds. He earned three Academic All-Big Ten honors and three Big Ten Distinguished Scholar awards. He was exactly the kind of player who thrives in a system that values intelligence over athleticism — a center who knew where to be, when to seal, and how to finish with either hand around the rim.
At Duke
When Coach K retired after the 2022 Final Four, Jon Scheyer inherited a program that needed frontcourt depth behind incoming five-star center Dereck Lively II. Young, who had graduated from Northwestern with a degree in learning and organizational change, entered the transfer portal and chose Duke over Georgetown, Georgia Tech, and Boston College. He enrolled in the Fuqua School of Business to pursue an accelerated MBA. "I am ecstatic about this opportunity and can't wait to get to work," he said.
The connection ran through Chris Collins. Scheyer was a Northbrook, Illinois native who had played at Duke when Collins was an assistant coach there. Young had spent three years learning under Collins at Northwestern. The coaching tree was the pipeline — and it brought Young to Durham at exactly the moment Scheyer needed a veteran big man who understood how Duke basketball was supposed to work, even if the man who built it was no longer on the sideline.
In Scheyer's first season, 2022-23, Young was supposed to back up Lively. But when Lively was sidelined early with a calf injury, Young stepped in and immediately showed the Cameron Indoor regulars what he could do. In the season opener against Jacksonville, he went 6-for-6 from the field with 12 points and 7 rebounds. The Duke Basketball Report captured his essence perfectly: "We watched him in the summer scrimmage videos just killing Duke's young big men. He slipped behind them, passed around them or shot falling away from them." Even after Lively returned and took over the starting role — eventually blocking 82 shots on the season — Young remained one of the team's most consistent and reliable producers. Of the nine Blue Devils who played 400-plus minutes, he led the team in field goal percentage at a remarkable 68.5%. He finished the year averaging 6.4 points and 5.5 rebounds in 17.8 minutes, appearing in all 36 games. He grabbed a career-high 15 boards against Oregon State, including 8 offensive rebounds — the first Blue Devil to reach that mark since Mark Williams the year before.
Then came the game that cemented his legacy. On New Year's Eve 2022, in his 100th career game, Young went 7-for-7 from the field and 6-for-6 from the free throw line for 20 points and 12 rebounds in a blowout win over Florida State. It was the first time in Duke history that a player recorded a 20-10 double-double without missing a shot. Not Laettner. Not Brand. Not Zion. A grad transfer from Northwestern, in his 100th game, doing something no Blue Devil ever had. The Cameron crowd gave him a standing ovation, and his teammates mobbed him at the bench.
He came back for a fifth year in 2023-24 — a decision that mattered more than his stat line would suggest — and was named team captain alongside Jeremy Roach and Tyrese Proctor. A graduate transfer earning the armband over McDonald's All-Americans and five-star freshmen said everything about what he meant to the program's culture. His role shifted: he started only twice all season, backing up Kyle Filipowski at center, but his impact was unmistakable. He shot 58.2% from the field, connected on 81.3% of his free throws — a career best — and provided the kind of veteran steadiness that young teams need in March. When Duke rallied from a second-half deficit to beat Baylor 78-70 at Madison Square Garden, Young was in the middle of the decisive surge. In Duke's Sweet 16 win over top-seeded Houston, he played 23 key minutes off the bench and finished +18.
He eclipsed 1,000 career points against Baylor in December and finished his five-year college career with 1,074 points, 158 games played across two programs, and a .579 career field goal percentage. The numbers don't capture what Ryan Young actually was: the oldest player on every roster he joined, the one who made freshmen better by teaching them how to set a screen, how to seal a defender, how to play with patience in a sport that rewards speed.
Where Is He Now
Ryan Young walked out of Cameron Indoor Stadium with something most Duke basketball players never get: a Fuqua MBA. He graduated as a Fuqua Scholar — top 10% of his class — while simultaneously playing Division I basketball and serving as team captain. He wasn't choosing between basketball and business school. He was doing both, and excelling at both. When his classmates were pulling all-nighters on case studies, Young was pulling down offensive rebounds against North Carolina. When his teammates were sleeping in before shootaround, he was in a finance lecture.
After graduation, Young joined Boston Consulting Group as a consultant, trading pump fakes in the post for strategy decks in corporate boardrooms. It was the kind of career pivot that a Fuqua MBA enables and that five years of navigating college basketball — two programs, three coaching staffs, a pandemic season, the advent of NIL, the explosion of the transfer portal — had prepared him for. He still shows up at Cameron to watch games in person, and in December 2024 he sat down with the Duke Basketball Roundup podcast to share his perspective on how the game has changed. His vantage point was unique: a player who started his career at Northwestern with no NIL and no transfer portal and ended it at Duke in a world where both defined the sport.
He also hosted The Brotherhood podcast while at Duke — yes, that Brotherhood — giving fans an inside look at the program from a player's perspective. It was the kind of thing only a grad-transfer captain could pull off: someone old enough and secure enough in his role to be a public voice for the team without it feeling like a distraction. "I love going out to a good brunch," he told Let's Talk Durham in a lighter moment. "Being from Jersey, a bagel for breakfast was a staple."
Ryan Young played 158 college basketball games across five seasons and two schools. He set a Duke record that no one saw coming. He earned an MBA from one of the best business schools in the country while wearing the captain's armband. And somewhere in Stewartsville, New Jersey, there's a pickup game where a slow, wide-bodied center is backing someone down in the post, pump-faking twice, and scoring over everyone — and the guys on the sideline are shaking their heads, because they've seen this movie before.