Duquesne's Keith Dambrot wins 500th game, walks into basketball history with LeBron James

Two decades before Keith Dambrot won the 500th game of his 25-year coaching career, he walked into Shaka Smart’s office and said, “Come with me.”

Off they went to a gym in Akron where Smart, not knowing what would happen next, watched a Hummer pull up to the curb. Out stepped LeBron James.

“Keith turned to me and threw me a basketball and said, ‘C’mon. We’re going to work out LeBron,’ ” said Smart, now the coach at No. 10 Marquette. “For the next couple months, about two, three times a week, that’s exactly what we did.

“It just says something about Keith, the way that he included me in that. He always treated me like an equal, even though he was more accomplished and further along in the business.”

Dambrot, 64, was James’ coach at Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High School, winning state championships when James was a freshman and sophomore.

The two men first met at a $1 basketball clinic Dambrot conducted at Akron’s Jewish Community Center. James was 13.

From one ???? to another#GoDukes pic.twitter.com/BCnBRyHpN3

— Duquesne Basketball (@DuqMBB) February 9, 2023

Appropriately, they stepped into basketball history on consecutive days this week.

• James became the all-time NBA scoring leader Tuesday night by recording 38 points for the Los Angeles Lakers against the Oklahoma City Thunder, passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and settling — for the moment — at 38,390 in 20 seasons.

• Dambrot’s Dukes defeated George Mason, 75-52, on Wednesday night at the UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse, making him only the eighth active coach outside a high major conference (Power 5 or Big East) with 500 victories. The total includes 305 in 13 seasons at Akron and 87 in nearly six at Duquesne.

After the game, the players met Dambrot with a water bath, and he showed up at his postgame new conference with wet clothes and a smile.

“We drowned him with water,” guard Tevin Brewer said.

“You might as well say he jumped in the pool,” Dae Dae Grant added.

But Dambrot said any comparison between his 500th victory and LeBron’s moment is out of bounds.

“People ask me about LeBron breaking the record and me getting 500,” he said. “That’s a joke. Those aren’t even comparable. That guy’s a special human being.

“For me, it’s nice, but we’re 16-8 and let’s see where we can go from here. That’s kind of how I view the thing. I think it will mean a little bit more to me once I’m done. I just want to win as many games as we can and get these guys what they deserve, really. They put a lot of time in it.”

Dru Joyce, who joined the Duquesne staff last May, played for Dambrot at St. Vincent-St. Mary and Akron. He flew to Los Angeles on Tuesday to watch his high school pal and teammate make NBA history before returning Wednesday.

“When I think about coach Dambrot in those early years, definitely a lot younger,” Joyce said, with a laugh. “But his mind was brilliant at that young age. He could feel and see everything that was going on around him.

“He had constant eyes on you, trying to push you to get better. There weren’t any details or any plays that got by him. He was just sharp. He’s still that way today.

“He’s probably not, maybe, as confrontational as he once was. I don’t mean that in a negative sense. When he sees good, when he sees great, his mindset is to push to get you to be better than that or, at least, to achieve that consistently.”

Dambrot said he pushed a littler harder at St. Vincent-St. Mary because he detected a special level of basketball intelligence in his players — James and everyone else.

“I still hold people to a really high standard, but when I was young, I was relentless,” Dambrot said. “Hard, tough. I treated these guys like they were seniors in college because I thought they could be that good. I probably treated LeBron like he was a four-year NBA guy.

“I was ruthless, relentless because I didn’t want him to flush it down the toilet. Really, it was out of love, but it probably didn’t appear that way at the time.”

Smart, who previously led programs at VCU and Texas, calls Dambrot “my favorite person who I ever worked with in this business.”

“He put his arm around me and treated me like a brother from the first day working as assistants at the University of Akron. We had never met before. He had no reason to treat me in such a kind and friendly way.

“He taught me so many things. He taught me the value of reaching out to coaches who, for whatever reason, were down on their luck. Keith was also so kind to people who were a little bit down.”

Smart said it was “a genius move” for Dambrot to instruct his Akron assistants to enter the locker room for 10 minutes after every practice.

“During that 10 minutes,” Smart said, “we were able to repair any relationships we had, maybe, challenged during practice to really get the guys in a good place before they left the building.”

Though he’s much shorter than his players, Dambrot is in his element when he marches into the middle of a Duquesne practice. He’s been on the other side, too.

Dambrot was the MVP on the 1980 Akron baseball team, playing infield and compiling the third-best career on-base percentage in school history (.480). He said he was hit by a pitch 18 times in one season.

But he became a student of the game of basketball.

“From a coaching standpoint, he probably is the best meat-and-potatoes basketball coach I’ve ever been around,” Smart said. “From the standpoint of truly teaching the game in practice, the offensive end, the defensive end, individual skills.

“He had a real way with players based on the relationships he had built with them.”

Want proof? Every Duquesne assistant played for Dambrot at one time.

“I think there are very few programs in the country who can say what we can say,” he said. “We tell recruits either those guys are really stupid or I’m not such a bad guy.

“It means a lot. It’s always good to be around your friends, but your friends can also tell you your breath stinks. That’s the good thing about it. They tell you the truth.”

Duquesne won a total of 40 games in 2019 and 2020, the program’s most victories in consecutive seasons since 1971-1972. But the Dukes slumped to 6-24 last season, triggering Dambrot’s desire to rebuild the Dukes’ culture.

“He wanted to find a way to get back to winning and also create a culture,” Joyce said. “Over the course of his career, he’s had a culture when you think back to his Akron seasons. There was a culture that was amongst the players.

“Losing hurt, yes, but lacking the connection hurt, maybe, even more. It’s been a focus for us to rebuild our culture. That was one of the first things he said upon (Joyce) joining the staff.

”It wasn’t, ‘Hey, we have to win a certain amount of games. We have to rebuild this culture. It isn’t right and we need to get it right.’ “

Tre Williams, a junior forward on the current team, said he knows how Dambrot won all those games.

“A lot of guys don’t get that done in their careers,” he said. “Just shows how hard he pushes his players to be great. I trust him as a coach and as a human being.”