This is fantastic news. He earned every bit of this honor!
Thanks Jake for your perseverance and outstanding play to help our success this year! Many more to come.

Welcome officially to the Duquesne Dukes!

The right thing to do.

I love Jake. He was one of the main reasons the Dukes made their run last year. I’ll never forget his basket in the closing seconds against VCU in the A-10 Championship game off the perfect dish from Jimmy. So calm, cool, and collected he was and we don’t win that game if he misses that shot.  I am thoroughly pleased that he will be playing for the Dukes next season. Does anybody else find it odd that the school or the coach did not announce this?  Or that the word “athletic” was not preceding “scholarship” in his tweet?  I’m hoping to see an announcement from the team soon. Jake deserves one of the 13 athletic scholarships allotted each Div 1 team. I don’t believe it doesn’t matter as long as he’s on the team.

El Presidente wrote:

I believe it will be difficult to take many minutes away from Jake next season. A hard worker who will come to the gym fully prepared for a battle at practice and at gametime. Looking forward to all the competition for PT on this team. Can only make us better. I think it's the most depth I've ever seen here. Please remind me of a deeper Dukes squad.

That this team is deep with very good experience players makes each practice as hard or harder than playing against most of our opponents. This is a great advantage and seeing the last games of this past season with playing 10 to 13 deep is kind of telling, that Coach Dru can likely get all these kids in most games this season. Having a deep bench is a nice problem to have.   

CLK wrote:

Great Article

https://www.dkpittsburghsports.com/2024/05/31/putting-jake-dimichele-on-scholarship-was-the-top-priority-for-dru-joyce-duquesne-dukes-atlantic-10-ncaa-cdc

Great article, indeed.

Jake is a great example of that old sports cliche, let the game come to you.  He does that as well as anyone I've ever seen. He stays cool, calm and collected and takes advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. 
 

This is excellent news. When it was first announced by Jake, I was skeptical that he was not on an athlete scholarship because there was no announcement by the coach, team, or university - still hasn’t been as far as I can tell but, from this article, it is clear that Coach Dru has done right by this kid and Jake has the respect of the team and staff. This was one of the last boxes I needed to check to be fully on board with the new coach.  This has been a home run of an off season for DRUquesne.  Last box to check is his in game coaching. I expect some growing pains - this is the A-10 you know.  I would love to see him institute a pro-style offense that the other coaches haven’t seen. The roster make-up is making me think this may be the case.

Last edited by Styles1229 (6/03/2024 8:53 am)