The Duke women’s basketball program reached its zenith under the tutelage of Gail Goestenkors.
The head coach from 1992 to 2007, Goestenkors led the program to unprecedented heights – four Final Fours, two national championship game appearances, five ACC championships in a row and seven consecutive 30-win seasons.
Heady times indeed. Goestenkors built a powerhouse in Durham, winning 396 games and losing just 99. On her watch, Duke developed some of the game’s best players, perhaps none better than Alana Beard, a versatile guard who won All-American honors three times and was the unanimous national player of the year in 2004.
A Michigan native, Goestenkors played collegiately at Saginaw Valley State and would coach at Iowa State and Purdue before coming to Duke in 1992.
She played a key role for USA Basketball as well. As an assistant coach she earned gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2004 Athens Olympics. She was head coach internationally for USA Basketball four times, winning gold at the 2005 FIBA Under-19 Women’s Basketball World Cup, 2002 FIBA World Championship for Women, silver at the 1997 William Jones Cup and bronze at the 2006 FIBA World Championship for Women.
She left Duke in 2007 to be the head women’s basketball coach at the University of Texas, where she coached until 2012.
In 2015, she was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. She also had brief coaching stints with the Los Angeles Sparks and Indiana Fever of the WNBA and at Central Michigan and the University of Kentucky.
