RALEIGH, N.C. — Mike Krzyzewski left West Point for good 45 years ago. He spent five years there as a coach and four as a cadet, two different experiences that set the tone for his entire life to date. West Point never left him. Nor has it left Duke, even after Krzyzewski’s retirement.

So much of what Krzyzewski learned in the Army — as a cadet, as an officer, as a coach — filtered through Duke’s program like water through limestone, leaving behind traces that still exist today, even after his departure.

As Duke makes its unusual Veterans Day visit to West Point on Tuesday, where Krzyzewski will be honored in front of a sold-out crowd that will include many of his former Army players, the two programs remain connected not only by Krzyzewski’s resume but a shared lineage of values and beliefs.

“Obviously, it’s sort of what birthed Coach K,” said ESPN broadcaster Chris Spatola, Krzyzewski’s son-in-law, a West Point graduate and a former Duke assistant coach. “The values that he conducted not just his life with, but he conducted his program with, were built out of that. The tone, the way he communicated, changed over time. But the values, he was never willing to compromise.”

Army coach Kevin Kuwik can see it from afar. Kuwik, a former Butler, Davidson and Ohio State assistant coach, served 10 years in the Army Reserve as an engineering officer after graduating from Notre Dame, and earned a Bronze Star during a tour of Iraq. For him, basketball and the military have long been important and inseparable parts of his life, and he can see some of the same in Krzyzewski and the program he built.

“One of the things I love that he says is, I don’t look at myself as a coach, I look at myself as a leader,” Kuwik said. “And I think with what this place is trying to develop, and all the different paths my guys are going to end up taking when they go through life, whether you’re a teacher or a salesman or you stay an officer in the army, that’s a great thing to live by and maximize the impact of this place on the rest of your life.”

It certainly did Krzyzewski’s, to the point where the impact of West Point was visible not only for more than four decades under Krzyzewski, but even under Jon Scheyer’s leadership. Duke isn’t a military academy, but its basketball team was built on the precepts of one.

Trust, candor, everyday courage

Those values are still reflected today in the pledge Duke players make to each other before every season, which may change from year to year on the periphery but never at the core: We look each other in the eye. We tell the truth. We show up on time. No excuses.

That emphasis on candor and everyday courage — not accepting defeat, bouncing back from adversity — was straight out of the Army training manual. The way the military develops officers is the way Duke’s program has, and still does, try to develop players. That’s not as easy to do in the one-and-done era, but the intention has not changed.

Many of these same values, and more, ended up in the code Krzyzewski would ask NBA players to adopt during his time coaching USA Basketball, an operation run even more in the spirit of a military unit than Duke because of the necessity of forging close bonds among disparate personalities in very short order under intense pressure.

“When you’ve really distilled down what Coach K has done both at Duke and in his time with USA Basketball, he developed an uncommon degree of trust among the athletes themselves and between the athletes and him,” said Gen. Martin Dempsey (ret.), who teaches at Duke and now serves as chairman of USA Basketball.

“That’s very much what our military is built upon. It wouldn’t surprise you to know you’d be out of your mind to walk out of a base camp in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else if you didn’t trust the man or woman to your left or right. One of the qualities Coach K has managed to inculcate in his athletes is that sense of trust.”

All of that is easy to understand during the period when Krzyzewski was the basketball coach at Duke. It was impossible to separate Krzyzewski the coach from Krzyzewski the veteran. His career was built on that bedrock. But it is fascinating how so much of that has endured under Scheyer, with no military experience of his own.

Certainly, playing for Duke can be a bit of an adjunct education in military science for a four-year player and future assistant coach like Scheyer. It’s hard not to absorb those principles by osmosis, even without a uniform.

“Coach K every year would teach us about things he learned in training, in his time at West Point,” Scheyer said. “And it was really true for who coach was, but also our program through the years has replicated or represented, I think, the discipline that you see at West Point or in our military. And that definitely comes from his background.”

A successful change of command

There was also something unique to Scheyer that seemed to gravitate toward that, both as a player and later when he joined Krzyzewski on the bench. The mental attributes that made Scheyer a leader, capable of making the switch from shooter to point guard as a senior to help Duke to a national title, may have suited him equally well at West Point.

“There was not a player more reflective of a cadet, or whose personality would have translated better to a cadet more than Jon,” Spatola said. “He was a soldier in many ways, the way he lived his life. There was a way about him as a person that was very cadet-like. He was eager to please. He followed orders. He wanted to be that translator — in the military, it would be down in the motor pool or in the break room or during chow time, the communicating of the message from leadership and translating that for soldiers.

“I remember during the run to the national title (in 2010), Jon standing up in meetings and saying, ‘We got this, you don’t have to give us the lecture today.’ That bearing of responsibility, taking some of the load of the leadership, was very cadet-like. And also the emotion, the connection. Jon was very emotional as a teammate and as a player because of his connection to Duke and these values.”

Even the transition from Krzyzewski to Scheyer smacked of military discipline — less a coaching change than a change of command, the orderly transfer of responsibility from one leader to another. That had been ingrained upon Krzyzewski as a junior officer, and if he saw himself as a basketball general by the end of his career, he was certain that he would hand the flag to his successor in the best possible position.

And now, with that transition complete, and Duke having returned to the Final Four for the first time without him last April, he returns to the place where it all started, as a cadet and as a coach, as Army hosts a power-conference team at Christl Arena for the first time in 28 years. There’s already an athletic leadership award named after Krzyzewski, awarded annually to a coach and cadet. But this will be a culminating acknowledgement of what he did for West Point, and what West Point did for him.

“The way I look at it, he’s kind of the premier alum of Army basketball,” Kuwik said. “Obviously we’ve had generals and all kinds of successful, accomplished people, but when you talk about basketball and talk about West Point, and what he’s done – this brings his career full circle back to West Point and the lessons he learned.”

Krzyzewski didn’t necessarily have to leave Durham or return to West Point to drive that point home. The program he built at Duke is as much a testament to it as anything.

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