In the fall of 1991, Stan Brunson arrived at Duke from Wilmington Christian School in Hockessin, Delaware, to play soccer. He was 6'8", which is large for soccer — large for anything, frankly — and he had a college-credible game with his feet that had been good enough to get him to a top-25 academic school on a soccer scholarship. He had also played high school basketball, where his size was a more obvious advantage and where the Newark, Delaware area's small-school competition gave him plenty of mismatch nights. Duke had recruited the soccer side of him. Basketball had not been part of the plan.
Then on December 28, 1992, Mike Krzyzewski's defending national champions had a problem. Antonio Lang was hurt. Cherokee Parks was the senior anchor of the frontcourt, Grant Hill the brilliant sophomore wing, Erik Meek the freshman backup big, but with Lang sidelined and the team's depth thin, Krzyzewski needed an extra body in practice. Brunson was 6'8" and on campus. The basketball staff invited him over from soccer. He was given his first cue to walk into Cameron Indoor Stadium as a member of the men's basketball team that night.
The first time Stan Brunson walked into Cameron as a basketball player, he was not wearing a Duke jersey. He had been on the team for hours. The locker room had handed him a practice shirt to wear, and that was what he walked out in. He was a soccer player who had, that afternoon, become a basketball player. The Duke Chronicle would interview him about it three and a half years later, near the end of his senior season, and the lead of the piece would open with that walk: the day Stan Brunson, walk-on from Wilmington Christian, didn't yet have a uniform.
He had been a kid in Hockessin who could do most things on a field or a court. Wilmington Christian School, where he played, is a small private K-12 in northern Delaware that sits in the basketball shadow of Salesianum, St. Mark's, and the public-school giants of New Castle County. He was the team's center, and a soccer forward, and that combination of size and footwork in a small-school program is the kind of thing a Duke soccer staff notices. A Duke basketball staff would not, at any normal point in any normal year, have noticed him. But Antonio Lang got hurt, and the schedule did not have a normal day on December 28, 1992, and a 19-year-old soccer player from Delaware became a walk-on for one of the most decorated basketball programs in the country.