Road to Duke
Todd Singleton never planned to play basketball at Duke. He planned to study engineering there. Basketball was something he had done at Old Mill High School in Millersville, Maryland — two years of varsity, 10.0 points and 6.5 rebounds per game on a 12-9 team. Respectable, but not the kind of numbers that get you recruited by anyone in the ACC. Yale, maybe. Cornell. Not Duke.
Born and raised in Severn, Maryland, a quiet community in Anne Arundel County wedged between Baltimore and Annapolis, Singleton was the kind of kid who excelled at everything he touched. He carried a 4.0 GPA at Old Mill. His SAT score was 1,270. He won a Maryland state championship in the high jump as a junior — his coach, Paul Bunting, called his athletic ability exceptional despite the modest basketball resume. He volunteered for the Special Olympics, worked in homeless shelters, and served as a therapeutic counselor for the mentally challenged. The National Achievement Scholarship Program recognized him as an Outstanding Negro Student. He was listed in Who's Who Among American High School Students.
"When I decided on Duke, I pretty much reserved myself to playing rec ball, playground ball around Durham and didn't think I would ever get a chance to play for the big team," Singleton later told the Baltimore Sun. Then, in late October of his freshman year, injuries ravaged Duke's roster during the worst season in program history, and Coach K's staff posted an ad for open tryouts. "I saw an ad in the paper for tryouts and my friends encouraged me to give it a shot," Singleton said. "I went out in early November with about 80 others and got to play a little. When they called me afterward to be pretty much a practice player, I couldn't believe it."
At Duke
The timing was brutal and perfect. Singleton walked on during the 1994–95 season — the year Coach K missed most of the schedule with back surgery, the year Duke went 13-18 and finished last in the ACC, the lowest point in the modern history of the program. He initially sat on the bench in a coat and tie. When Joey Beard transferred to Boston University at the semester break, Singleton was elevated to the 13th roster spot and put in uniform for the first time.
He was a walk-on on the worst Duke team in forty years. And he stayed.
That is the essential fact of Todd Singleton's Duke basketball career. He didn't leave when the program was at its nadir. He was there for the 13-18 season. He was there for the recovery — the 1995–96 team that went 18-13, the 1996–97 squad that surged back to 24-9, and the 1997–98 team that earned a top seed in the NCAA Tournament before falling to Kentucky in the Elite Eight. Four years, beginning at rock bottom and ending near the summit. The walk-on from Old Mill rode the entire arc.
His career stats tell one story: 42 games, 0.9 points per game, a fixture at the end of the bench. But the people inside the program told a different one. Krzyzewski praised what Singleton brought to practice every day: "More than anything else, Todd gives a consistent presence on defense. Much of the improvement of Jeff Capel, Trajan Langdon and Ricky Price is due to Todd's defense on them in practice. His work ethic is an example for a lot of our guys."
Steve Wojciechowski, Singleton's fellow Maryland native — Wojo had been a blue-chip recruit from Cardinal Gibbons in Severna Park while Singleton was averaging 10 points at Old Mill down the road — offered his own assessment: "He's a great guy to have around. He brings a positive attitude and we're really lucky that he's a part of our team. He has really improved. He is a legitimate college basketball player."
Singleton understood his role with a clarity that was itself a gift. "Coach K asked me to be on the team to help reach team goals," he said. "Not so much to develop into a game-time player, but so that I can push my teammates to the best they can be for game day." Through it all, he carried a 3.5 GPA as an electrical engineering major — one of the most demanding academic programs at one of the most demanding universities in the country, while practicing two hours a day with some of the best basketball players in America.
"It's definitely been by far my best class at Duke, to best understand myself and how I operate," he said of the basketball experience. "I'm learning more and more to dig deep, push myself and be a part of something bigger than myself."
After Duke
If Todd Singleton's Duke basketball career was about learning to push himself and be part of something bigger, his post-Duke career has been about applying those lessons at scale.
After graduating from Duke with his electrical engineering degree, Singleton went to Stanford University for a master's degree in engineering. From there, he built a career in technology that reads like a who's who of Silicon Valley and enterprise computing. He worked as a product and engineering leader at IBM, where he served as a chief evangelist. He moved into capital markets technology at Calypso Technology, then joined Mashery — an API management company later acquired by Intel — where he rose from director of sales engineering to global sales director to global director of solutions. At Intel, he became an entrepreneur in residence for new business initiatives.
The résumé kept climbing. Singleton served as head of cloud customer engineering at Google, then became a general manager for go-to-market digital app innovation at Microsoft. Along the way, he taught API strategy at General Assembly, explaining with characteristic warmth that he was "passionate about the cross section of technology and business" and that he loved to "teach, learn, collaborate, and meet new people." He also returned to Duke as a board member of the university's Kenan Institute for Ethics — a fitting appointment for a man whose high school years were defined as much by homeless shelter volunteering and Special Olympics coaching as by basketball.
Where Is He Now
There is a specific kind of person who sees an ad in a college newspaper for basketball tryouts — knowing he averaged 10 points per game at a mid-level Maryland high school, knowing he's walking into a gym with 80 other hopefuls, knowing the team just went 13-18 and the whole thing might be cursed — and thinks, I should give this a shot.
That person, it turns out, is the same one who goes from Duke to Stanford to IBM to Intel to Google to Microsoft. The same one who carries a 3.92 GPA as a freshman while practicing with Division I athletes, and a 3.5 GPA as a junior electrical engineering major while guarding Trajan Langdon every day in practice.
Todd Singleton played 42 games and scored 38 points in four years at Duke. Those numbers will never appear on a highlight reel. But Krzyzewski himself said that the improvement of three of his best players was due to Singleton's defense in practice. Wojciechowski called him a legitimate college basketball player. He was there for the worst season and the best, for the bottom and the climb back, for the coat-and-tie bench and the Cameron Indoor roar.
"My experience has been a time of tremendous growth and blessings," he said during his junior year. "I have had incredible ups and incredible downs."
He meant basketball. But he could have been talking about the whole arc of a remarkable life — one that began with a tryout ad in a student newspaper and has never stopped climbing.