The Capital Classic All-Star Game in the spring of 1992 featured what was, at the time, one of the most loaded high school senior rosters in the country. The visiting United States All-Stars had Jason Kidd from St. Joseph Notre Dame in Alameda, California, headed to Cal. They had Chris Collins from Glenbrook North in Northbrook, Illinois, headed to Duke. They had a host of future ACC, Big Ten, and Big East starters. The hometown Capital All-Stars — the DC-and-mid-Atlantic select team — had Donta Bright (Massachusetts), Exree Hipp (Maryland), Serge Zwikker (North Carolina), Duane Simpkins (Maryland), and a 6'8" forward from Newport Preparatory School in Kensington, Maryland, named Tony Moore.
The Capital All-Stars lost 103-101. Moore went 3-for-5 from the field, 2-for-2 from the line, and finished with eight points. The coach of his side that night was Stu Vetter, the longtime DC-area prep coach who had built his own program at Harker Prep in Potomac. Vetter remembered Moore years later. "He was one of the top players for sure," he told the Montgomery County Sentinel. "He was an outstanding athlete and was a player that was very coachable and someone that you liked to be around."
Moore had grown up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington and had attended Newport Preparatory School in Kensington, a small Montgomery County private school whose basketball program under coach Harold Gaither punched well above its enrollment. By the spring of 1989, Moore was a sophomore center who USA Today had identified as one of the best in the Washington area. "He's the one everyone is raving about," Gaither told the Sentinel that year. Marcus Wiggins, Newport's point guard at the time and later the head coach at Blake High School, was more specific: "In the Urban Coalition League, Tony matched up against some of the best like Michael Smith, and that says a lot." Smith, of Dunbar High and Providence College, would go on to be drafted by the Sacramento Kings in 1994. Moore was already holding his own against him in DC pickup leagues as a sixteen-year-old.
By his junior summer he was on the AAU circuit, matching up against the best teenagers in the country. Glenn "Big Dog" Robinson, the future Purdue All-American and 1994 NBA No. 1 overall pick, was one of the names Moore was running against in those summers. By senior year — by the spring of 1992, the spring of the Capital Classic — the recruiting letters were piling up. Duke, Virginia, NC State, Kentucky, Iowa, and others. Mike Krzyzewski's program had just won its second consecutive national championship. There was no harder ticket in college basketball than a Duke scholarship offer, and Moore had one.
The Duke pitch was personal. Calvin Hill — the former Cowboys, Redskins, and Browns running back, four-time Pro Bowler, 1969 NFL Rookie of the Year, and at that point the father of Duke's just-finished freshman All-American Grant Hill — made frequent recruiting trips to Newport's Kensington campus to woo Moore for Krzyzewski. Hill the father had played football at Yale; Hill the son was already, by his sophomore year at Duke, one of the most celebrated college basketball players in America. Their family endorsement of the Duke program was the kind of recruiting weapon no other school could match. It worked. Tony Moore committed to Duke in the spring of 1992 and arrived in Durham that fall as one of two freshmen brought in to a roster that had won back-to-back national championships and was about to begin the long descent that defined the rest of the Krzyzewski 90s.