Duquesne coach ready to write his final chapter
Duquesne men’s basketball Coach Keith Dambrot is ready to end his career, but preferably not this week.
Ideally, he’ll head into retirement some time in April, following a deep run by his Dukes in their first NCAA Tournament appearance since 1977.
“I’m glad I made the decision to come [to Duquesne], it was challenging, and hopefully we’ve still got some games left,” Dambrot, 65, said Monday at a news conference. “I told our guys this morning, ‘Look, we’re good enough to continue to win.’ So we’re not going to go into the tournament not trying and just being glad to be there, we’re going to try to win. Hopefully we can finish it off strong.”
Having gone 24-11 this season, with a championship run in the Atlantic 10 Tournament, the Dukes were given a No. 11 seed in the NCAA bracket revealed Sunday. They will face sixth-seeded BYU on Thursday in a first-round game in Omaha, Neb.
Regardless of how the Dukes fare in their quest to reach the Final Four for the first time since 1940 — when the field had just eight teams — Dambrot can walk away knowing he has brought the program back to prominence. Before he came to the Pittsburgh-based school in 2017, its men’s team had just one 20win season in the previous 35 years. Duquesne has topped that mark three times in his seven seasons, and this squad’s 24 wins are the most for the Dukes since 1954.
That team featured Dambrot’s father, Sid Dambrot, forging a connection to Duquesne that lured the coach there following a 13-year stint at Akron. When Sid Dambrot died in 2021 at 90, he was buried in his 1954 Duquesne letter sweater.
On Monday, Keith Dambrot cited his father’s passing as part of “a tough seven years” in Pittsburgh that has also included the pandemic and rule changes such as a transfer portal now featuring immediate eligibility for players.
It was revealed this year that Dambrot’s wife is battling breast cancer, and he said that development cemented a decision on retirement toward which he had been moving since before the season began.
“Last summer, I was about 80% sure I was going to retire after this year. I just felt like it was time,” Dambrot said Monday. “I was going to be 66 in my next year. I love it, but I felt like I made a lot of sacrifices to get to this point, and our family had made a lot of sacrifices. I thought that the environment had changed.”
“I’m a little too high-strung to go too long or I’m going to affect my health,” he added, “so I was about 80% sure I was going to retire. … But then when my wife got sick, I think that was the crowning blow for me, so I just decided before the season that this was going to be it for me. And so, at this point, this is it for me.”
One of 28 men’s Division I coaches with at least 500 wins, Dambrot has gone 115-95 at Duquesne, which was 60-97 over five seasons with previous Coach Jim Ferry. At Akron, Dambrot compiled a record of 305-139, with three Mid-American Conference tournament championships, six regular-season titles and three conference coach of the year awards.
An Akron native who played in college for the Zips, Dambrot spent three years as a high school coach in that Ohio city. In two of those years, his team featured Akron’s favorite son, LeBron James. On Monday, James shared a link to an X, formerly Twitter, post by Duquesne celebrating Dambrot’s achievement, adding in a caption, “THE BEST !!!!!! ” That followed an X post by James on Sunday congratulating Dambrot and proclaiming the NBA superstar’s “love” for his high school coach.
Dambrot’s first Division I head coaching job lasted just two years at Central Michigan, from 1991 until April 1993, when he was fired for repeatedly using the n-word during a late-season address to his team. The school initially suspended him for four days before deciding to part ways, saying in a statement at the time that “public reaction to the incident has since created an environment that makes it impossible for the university to conduct a viable basketball program under Coach Dambrot’s leadership.”
In a subsequent lawsuit against Central Michigan for wrongful termination, Dambrot was joined by several of his former players, most of them Black. Dambrot testified at the time that he asked his players before the address if it would be okay for him to use the word in the kind of “positive and reinforcing” manner they were said to have frequently used it. An appellate panel upheld a district court’s ruling that his firing did not violate Dambrot’s First Amendment rights.
Dambrot had earlier served as an assistant at Central Michigan in a stint sandwiched between head coaching stops at two universities with Division II programs, Tiffin and Ashland.
In Monday’s comments at a news conference, Dambrot said that despite his familial ties to Duquesne, he initially resisted some overtures from the school because he wasn’t sure its administration was fully committed then to supporting a competitive basketball program. He went on to praise current Duquesne officials, as well as his team this season for overcoming an 0-5 start in A-10 play that dropped the Dukes record to 9-8.
“Their willingness to sacrifice to win,” he said of this season’s players, “was second to none.”