Dru Joyce III Ready to Continue Winning Ways as Head Coach of Duquesne

PITTSBURGH — Duquesne basketball is coming off its best season in almost half a century and new head coach Dru Joyce III was there for the entirety of it.

The Dukes won the A-10 Tournament for the first time since 1977 and defeated the No. 6 BYU Cougars in the Round of 64 for their first NCAA Tournament victory since 1969. Despite starting 9-8 overall and 0-5 in the A-10, the only thing that anyone will remember is the great success for a program lacking it over the past few decades.

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Joyce spent the past two seasons as associate head coach under then Dukes head coach Keith Dambrot. He helped Dambrot with head coaching duties, leading the team and running practices while Dambrot tended to his wife who is battling breast cancer.

Dambrot retired following the season and this past Thursday, Duquesne announced that Joyce would succeed him as the one to take the helm of the basketball program.

“Just overcome with joy,” Joyce said at his introductory press conference on Monday at the Duquesne Student Union. “Overcome with joy, to have this opportunity to have a dream come to fruition and for people to believe in me and to just lead a program and you’ll have to deal with my emotions the whole time through because I’m excited and passionate about what I do.”

While the past two seasons Joyce spent working under, or rather alongside Dambrot, their history stretches farther back.

Dambrot and Joyce know each other going back three decades, since Joyce was around 12 years old. He would coach Joyce at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio and then again in college at Akron from 2003-07, including 2004-07 as head coach.

Joyce joined Duquesne at a difficult time for the program. The team finished the 2021-22 season 6-24 overall and 1-17 in Atlantic-10 play, one of the worst seasons in Duquesne history.

Dambrot called Joyce, who was currently at Cleveland State at the time. Head coach Dennis Smith left for the same job at Missouri and the program chose to go in a different direction than Joyce, who served as an assistant under Smith for the previous three seasons.

Leaving Ohio to come to Pittsburgh initially came as a difficult decision for Joyce, but knowing he’d work with a coach who he saw as a mentor and a great man, it was an offer he had to take.

“I knew he only had a couple years left and I didn’t know what that looked like for my family,” Joyce said. “It was a risk, but it was worth the risk to be able to not only help him, but to learn from him and to be by his side because I know who he is and what he represents. I just wanted to bring whatever value that I thought I had, all the energy that I could to make him successful, shed a light on this program and in doing so, I think we accomplished something pretty good.”

Winning at Duquesne isn’t something that fans of the program are used to, but the history of success is there. The program had its best period in the early to mid-1950s, making seven straight postseason appearances.

Some of the greatest players in program history competed during this era. The likes of Chuck Cooper, Sihugo Green, Dick Ricketts and Jim Tucker led the Dukes at various points during this time, which saw them make the Elite Eight in 1952, win the NIT in 1955 and finish runners-up in 1954.

Dambrot’s dad, Sid Dambrot, played for Duquesne from 1952-54, winning 69 games and losing just 15. He wanted to bring back that winning culture of his father to Duquesne when he left Akron in 2017 and now, Joyce will try to continue that winning from last season into next.

“That’s the mission, to do it again,” Joyce said. “It is a challenge, right. “I won’t say that [previous coaches] failed. Things maybe just didn’t go as planned, but I believe we have the right support from [Duquesne] president [Ken] Gormley to our athletic department to really keep the winning going, the spirit and the competitive drive. We just have to do it together. I think it takes more than one person in the room. I think it takes a whole department, a whole program to buy in. It takes you guys to buy in too. We need full support to accomplish what we want to.”

Taking on the head coaching role is still a big change for Joyce, who only has five prior seasons of coaching after finishing a 12-year pro career overseas in 2019.

Despite the lack of experience, he has a great family history in coaching. His father, Dru Joyce II, took over after Dambrot as head coach of boys’ basketball at St. Vincent-St. Mary in 2001 and has remained in the position since. His brother, Cameron Joyce, is a head coach at St. Ignatius High School in nearby Cleveland.

The values that Joyce’s father instilled into him at a young age gave him the motivation to want to coach later in his life, but also the know-how to coach properly, on-and-off the court. This made him ready to take the Duquesne job and work with his players as the true leader.

“I don’t think you ever know, right,” Joyce said. “When you’re ready or you’ll know what the experience will be, you gotta go through it. I will say my preparation has equipped me and I have a confident belief in myself, more than anything, so, I think, through hard work, being dedicated to the sport and what I believe our young men need, I have a sense of confidence and belief that, I’m more than capable of doing this job and leading our young men. I’ll be learning and growing day by day. I look forward to it.”

Lebron James is someone that is also synonymous when it comes to winning. The former teammate of Joyce at St. Vincent-St. Mary actually announced Joyce as head coach of Duquesne prior to anyone else.

While laughing about who the source was for James and his tweet, the relationship the two share is something that Joyce doesn’t take for granted and cherishes each and every day, which he has done since they were children.

 “It’s a bond, it’s a friendship, that goes way beyond that tweet from the other day, but back to our experience from nine, 10 years old,” Joyce said. “That’s where it really comes from. Just a couple young guys that had a lot in common that wrapped their minds around, you know, we’re going to be honest with each other, we’re going to motivate each other, that’s what we still continue to do to this day. Our loyalty to each other has been a huge part in each of our lives and that’s not something that’s easy to find, so you don’t want to replace anything like that, and it’s been a special relationship that I not only have with him, but with a group of friends. His support? That’s what we do, right, that’s just what we do. We’re always going to be there for each other.”

College basketball has numerous Black players across the sport, but Black head coaches are far fewer and in between. The number is growing from previous years, with the ACC having nine Black head coaches out of 15 teams at the start of this past season.

Still, there were only 24 Black head coaches across the 76 teams in the “Power” conferences at the beginning of the season.

Joyce will serve as one of four Black head coaches in the A-10, along with Drew Valentine of Loyola Chicago, Anthony Grant of Dayton and Tony Skinn of George Mason.

The chance to take over a program like Duquesne, with a great history with Black athletes in Cooper and Green playing in the 1950s, is something that Joyce is thankful to have the chance to do. He not only wants to represent the work Black head coaches of the past, but also to set an example for Black head coaches of the future.

“To me, blessed, fortunate,” Joyce said. “This opportunity doesn’t come to everybody and there’s a lot of people who would love to be able to stand here, but I also realize I get to stand on the shoulders of many that have come before me, many Black head coaches. I don’t take that responsibility lightly. I want to make sure that I am the best example of them, that I am the best leader that I can possibly be and that not only do I lead our men, but I make an impact within the community and that I leave a legacy for the next person to come and that I do things the right way, so I’m not the last.”

Duquesne athletic director Dave Harper said that he and the university conducted a nationwide search to find their new head coach. While they met with many great and distinguished coaches around the country, it didn’t take long until he realized that Joyce was the right person to take over the program going forward.

“As we went into this, it became apparent that he was ready to embrace the challenge,” Harper said on Joyce. “It became apparent that we wanted more. I think it was an unquestioned choice for us and I couldn’t be happier that he confirmed it today in person. I’ve got his word now.”

Joyce now has the difficulty of rebuilding the Dukes’ roster, which sees numerous players graduate. This includes star guards in Dae Dae Grant and Jimmy Clark III, as well as forwards in Dusan Mahorcic, Tre Williams and both Hassan and Fousseyni Drame.

He’ll spend the rest of spring and the summer scouring the country for new recruits and transfers to come in to rebuild the roster ahead of next season.

At the same time, he’ll work with the players returning in guards like Jake DiMichele and Kareem Rozier, and forwards Jakub Necas and David Dixon to keep the momentum going into next season.

Joyce has the family history of a great coaching and the experience under Dambrot. Now, it is his time to show others how he’ll build a strong culture at Duquesne, with great values on and off the court, that also and most importantly, maintains a high level of success.

“The challenges, people want to do it again,” Joyce said. “We want to do it again. That is the challenge in how you attack that and how do we build towards that and that is going to start in the room, in our locker room with our staff and our young men, the mindset that we have to embody and the connection that we have to have.”