Intercollegiate Athletics
A Place Where You're Going to be Challenged
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Alana Beard, the €rst Duke woman student-athlete to
have her basketball number retired.
Intercollegiate Athletics
Campaign Total: $152,495,531
New athletic facilities were built and many traditional sites
were renovated during the campaign in order to keep Duke programs
competitive in the ACC. More than $80 million came to support
student-athletes, with 24 members contributing some $27 million
to basketball’s Legacy Fund. Annual giving from the
Iron Dukes over eight years totaled $59,151,000 from 11,750
donors, and endowment — particularly for women’s
scholarships, which more than doubled — grew substantially.
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Alana Beard T’04, consensus All-American and winner of the
2002–03 ACC female student-athlete award, began playing basketball
with her older brother and his friends on a dirt court in Shreveport,
Louisiana, but they stopped playing with her when she proved unbeatable.
So she took her talents to the high school basketball team, following
in her mother’s footsteps, and led the team to four consecutive
state titles—all the while maintaining her honor roll status.
Beard is very
close to her family, which took cross-country trips together in
her father’s long-haul rig, so initially she did not want
to consider Duke because it seemed too far from home. But when she
visited Duke’s campus as a high school senior, Beard recalls,
“God gave me a feeling that I’ve never had before.”
It was the perfect fit, and she committed to Duke the next day.
In only six years, the University has nearly doubled the number
of athletic scholarships it offers to women, and Duke is working
hard to raise endowment to cover this investment. Beard’s
scholarship has been funded by the Iron Dukes and the Ed, Heather,
and Hilary Howard Athletic Scholarship Endowment Fund, Duke’s
first scholarship specifically targeting women’s basketball.
“A lot of us wouldn’t have been able to come to Duke
without the help of a scholarship,” she says. “It gives
us a real opportunity. Duke is top in the nation academically, and
I won’t have basketball forever.” A sociology major,
Beard is enrolled in Trinity College’s Markets and Management
Studies certificate program to feed her self-professed “entrepreneurial
spirit.” This innovative program takes an interdisciplinary
approach to business education, and Beard hopes to use what she
learns to help her one day open a 24-hour athletic facility back
home.
She characterizes Duke as a place where “you’re going
to be challenged,” whether in the classroom or on the court.
And she is not alone among athletes in her commitment to academics:
Duke is well-known for its high graduation rate for scholarship
athletes, and Beard says that no one on her team has had to sit
out of a game for academic reasons. Reflecting on the future of
athletics at Duke, she hopes “women’s basketball will
help strengthen the whole women’s athletic program.”
With student-athletes like Alana Beard, it already has.
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