Cheyenne Mountain High School sits on the western edge of Colorado Springs, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, looking up at the limestone face of the mountain whose name it shares — the same mountain whose granite-bunkered NORAD facility once held the United States' early-warning systems for the Cold War. The school's basketball program was respected within the Colorado 4A classification but had never been a national-recruiting destination. Steve Roger Johnson, born in Denver, Colorado on February 1, 1988, would graduate from Cheyenne Mountain in 2006 having done what he could with the platform: a second-team all-state selection and league MVP as a senior, averaging 19.0 points and 10.0 rebounds per game. As a junior he had earned honorable mention all-state honors at 14 points and 8 rebounds per game.
The athletic résumé that mattered most for what came next, though, was not in the basketball box scores. Johnson was a track and field standout — specifically a high jumper. He posted three top-five finishes in the high jump at the Colorado state championships, including a first-place state finish as a senior. The jumping ability on the high-school track confirmed what his basketball coaches had seen on the basketball court: this was a genuinely athletic 6'5" forward with the kind of explosive vertical leap that, at a major-conference college program, could project as a high-level practice player even if not as a scholarship recruit.
His father, Roger Johnson, is a principal advisor at Rio Tinto — the global mining and metals company. The Johnson family is a Colorado Front Range family of professionals; Steve's basketball was the family pursuit, but his academic path was always the priority. He enrolled at Duke in the fall of 2006 as a regular student.
On October 17, 2006, twelve days into Krzyzewski's preseason camp, Steve Johnson walked on to the Duke men's basketball team. He had been recruited only loosely — he was not in the Rivals.com or Scout.com top-100 rankings — but the coaching staff had seen enough on his Cheyenne Mountain tape and in the open-tryout setting to add him to the roster. He took jersey No. 51. He was 6'5", 195 pounds. He was, by the program's roster-page description, "an active player with the ability to push his teammates every day in practice" with "a nice outside shooting touch as well as the strength to defend in the paint."
He was also, in the way that Krzyzewski's program had always quietly valued, a multi-sport athlete who would soon expand his Duke athletic career across two NCAA sports.