A Stellar Career: Black, a former East Forsyth standout, is playing her final season with Blue Devils

DURHAM -- People who know Duke's Chante Black call her quiet and laid-back.

But when needed, they quickly add, she can be forceful.

Mazie Black got a taste of her daughter's assertive side about 18 years ago. She was about to leave on Christmas Day for yet another deployment in the Army.

Black, then 5, told her mother she was going to have to choose between her and the Army.

"If you don't want to see me, I don't want to see you again," Black recalled telling her mother.

Shortly after, Mazie Black quit a promising military career to spend more time with her only child.

Black's selective bursts of assertiveness get the attention of her Duke teammates as well, Coach Joanne P. McCallie said.

"She's not verbose. She's not a gabber," McCallie said. "But when she speaks, people listen."

Black, a fifth-year senior, is a 2004 graduate of East Forsyth High School. On Wednesday, she will play her last college game in Winston-Salem when No. 10 Duke meets Wake Forest at 7 p.m. at Joel Coliseum.

Black, a 6-5 center, has been a steady player throughout her career, particularly on defense, but this season she has expanded her repertoire of inside moves to become Duke's top offensive threat (15.2 ppg). After Sunday's 77-59 loss to Maryland, she was 76 rebounds away from becoming only the third player in ACC history with career totals of at least 1,300 points, 1,000 rebounds and 200 blocked shots. Last month, she was named one of 20 midseason candidates for the John R. Wooden Award, given annually to the top players (one woman, one man) in college basketball.

Biggest fan a distant fan

As she did last year, Black is playing without her biggest supporter cheering from the stands. Mazie Black is in her second year of teaching at an international school in Saudi Arabia. From thousands of miles away, Mazie Black is able to keep up with her daughter's games.

Last week, she went to a student's house at 3:30 a.m. and watched her daughter score 18 points in Duke's win over Tennessee.

"It is very, very, very difficult to be away from Chante, and I am really homesick knowing that this is her last year," she wrote in an e-mail. "But we talk often, send e-mails and connect through our hopes, prayers and dreams."

Mazie Black, a single mother, introduced her daughter to basketball. When Black was a toddler, she would sit in her carrier with a bottle and watch her mother play on an Army intramural team. People used to marvel at how focused young Chante was during those games, Black wrote.

As a grade-school student in Raleigh, Black loved to go to the gym with her first cousin Shane, his father, William Chamberlain, and Chamberlain's friend Charlie Scott. Chamberlain and Scott played basketball at North Carolina.

"I remember her coming home one day after hanging out with them and asking me: ‘Is Dean Smith important or something?'" Mazie Black wrote.

Black said she gravitated toward basketball because she wanted to spend time with her cousin. Basketball also seemed a natural for fit for Black, who towered over her classmates as early as kindergarten.

After Mazie Black left the Army -- she served in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm and Desert Shield -- she and her daughter moved around a bit before settling in Winston-Salem on the recommendation of a friend.

Big impression

Adrian Snow was teaching physical education at Wiley Middle School when a tall sixth-grader walked into his class.

He got in touch with Brian Robinson, who was starting a summer girls basketball program.

"Brian, you need to come to Wiley and see this kid," Robinson recalled Snow telling him. "She's 12 years old, and she's 6 feet tall."

Robinson, now the girls coach at Bishop McGuiness, said that Black was athletic and a quick learner.

"She was amazing from Day 1," he said. "You could see early on when she was that young that she had a great opportunity to be a special player at the highest level of basketball, and that's because she wanted to work and loved being in the gym."

Black changed high schools several times, in part because of transportation problems, before ending up at East Forsyth. She also played AAU ball for the Winston-Salem Stealers, Robinson's program.

She received her first recruiting letter when she was in the ninth grade.

"After that first letter, I thought, ‘OK. I can pursue this. I can achieve things,'" Black said.

Letters from other programs followed. Black, drawn to Duke's location and academics, committed to play for the Blue Devils and Coach Gail Goestenkors during her junior year of high school.

"My mom was not concerned about the basketball atmosphere. She wanted to know how a school would make me a better person in the long run," Black said.

Overcoming adversity

In nearly five seasons at Duke, Black has weathered a season-ending knee injury that resulted in a redshirt year, a heartbreaking loss to Maryland in the 2006 NCAA championship game and a coaching change.

McCallie said that Black has handled the challenges with grace.

"She's not a victim," McCallie said. "After the coaching change, she could have said, ‘Poor me.' But she moves with change."

Off the court, Black already has a bachelor of arts degree, with a double major in biological anthropology and anatomy and women's studies. She is now pursuing a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and anatomy.

Black originally wanted to be a pathologist but changed her mind after visiting a lab.

"Even though I don't like to talk a lot, I still want a social life," she said. "It was almost like you were quarantined. I like a little disruption now and then."

Black said she might study radiology after what she hopes will be a professional basketball career in the WNBA or overseas. Italy and Russia sound interesting, but not Saudi Arabia.

"I'm not as adventurous as my mom," Black said.

She also hopes to one day pick up the cello again, an instrument she played in middle school, and learn the sport of curling.

With her mother in Saudi Arabia, Black said she has few ties to Winston-Salem, although she is sure to see some familiar faces in the stands Wednesday.

The people here who remember her as the tall, skinny kid are not surprised by her success.

"You always understood she had a gift," Snow said.

■ Lisa O'Donnell can be reached at 727-7420 or at lo'donnell@wsjournal.com.