On Dylan Duke: an Artisan at the Net Front, “the Ultimate Teammate,” and an Ohioan Starring in Maize and Blue
“It was always Michigan for me”: Dylan Duke’s journey from the Cleveland suburbs to the University of Michigan and his family’s unique relationship to the Michigan-Ohio St Rivalry
“What he put in was just standing there and taking a one timer that was probably five feet wide off his ribs. When you stand there good things happen, and he’s always there.”
Michigan had just beaten its in-state rival 2-1, and the Wolverines’ head coach Brandon Naurato was asked to describe the contributions of sophomore forward Dylan Duke, whose first-period goal opened the scoring and snapped a six-game power play dry spell.
The goal, Duke’s tenth in twenty games this season, equaled his total in forty-one as a freshman. The sophomore has spent the year screening goaltenders, scoring on deflections and rebounds, or recovering loose pucks, but for his final goal of the season’s first half, Duke employed a less conventional means of redirection.
The winger absorbed a Luke Hughes one-timer—bound well wide of the net—off his left forearm, deflecting it past Michigan State goaltender Dylan St. Cyr. Duke lifted his hands in celebration, a grin stretched across his face, before removing his hand from his glove and trying to shake out the pain. Even as he winced, hand limp and exposed in front of him, he beamed, before being mobbed by delighted teammates.
Hughes and he have been “going back and forth about it” in the days since the goal, Duke explains as he points to the spot just inside his elbow where he took the shot.
He has just completed his third practice session at Team USA’s World Junior Selection Camp in Plymouth, fifteen miles or so down M-14 from his collegiate home at Yost.
In four days, the team chosen from the camp will travel to Moncton, New Brunswick for two pre-tournament exhibitions and then the group stage of the World Juniors. Duke could laugh about the knock before he’d made it back to the bench after absorbing it, so by now, he is nothing short of jubilant about it.
Duke provides a sample of the conversations with Hughes:
“Hughesy: ‘Bank shot, did it on purpose,’
“Me: ‘Yeah, Hughesy, you were gonna miss the net by four feet if I wasn’t there.’”
Equal parts sacrificial and skilled at the goal mouth, Dylan Duke brushes off the cross-checks to the spine or slap shots off the arm with a smile. Third on his team in goals and tied for fifth in scoring, Duke has graduated to a starring role as a sophomore for the Wolverines.
In a breakout season playing on the team’s top line and power play, Duke follows in the unlikely footsteps of Jim Mandich, Desmond Howard, and Charles Woodson as proud Ohioans who went on to star in maize and blue.
A native of the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville, Duke admits that “most of my family’s Ohio State fans, not too many Michigan fans” but adds that there are “a couple more now that I’m here kind of converting some people.”
Despite growing up on the outskirts of a football-mad Buckeye stronghold, Duke insists his loyalties to his school and to his sport stretch back to boyhood. “Even living in Ohio, I always wanted to be a Michigan hockey player,” Duke explains.“And when I had the opportunity, I didn’t even have to think about it. It was always Michigan for me.”
He adds that his arrival in Ann Arbor has won over a few relatives, even if rooting for Wolverine football remains a bridge too far: “We’ve got family members that’ll root for the Michigan hockey team, but definitely not the football team.”
When asked what spurred his unlikely allegiance to the Wolverines, Duke quips “it definitely wasn’t my dad. He played hockey at Western Michigan, so I don’t think he was the biggest Michigan fan.”
While it wasn’t necessarily his intention, Dylan’s father Steve (whose time at Western Michigan preceded a professional career that included ECHL stops in Johnstown, Mississippi, Charlotte, and South Carolina) did play a key role in securing his son’s loyalties for Michigan.
As Steve tells it, “I took Dylan and [his brother] Tyler to a Michigan game when Dylan was like five years old at Yost, and they played Western that night, and ever since he went to that first game, he’s always wanted to play for Michigan.” “When he was going through the recruiting process, we talked about Western,” Steve adds. “But he was pretty set from a young age that he wanted to play for Michigan.”
Even if it wasn’t his alma mater, Steve’s days in the old CCHA left him with a respect if not affinity for the University of Michigan. Having played in Kalamazoo between 1994 and 1998, the elder Duke competed against two Wolverine national championship teams. “I just remember playing at Yost Arena and how special that was and how loud it was with the band and everything. I’ve always said, I told Dylan and I still think, that Michigan’s the best atmosphere in college hockey.”
Steve Duke may not have meant to set his eldest son on a path to Ann Arbor, but he did make certain to expose Dylan to hockey as early as he could. As Steve recalls it, Dylan “was around two years old when he got his first pair of skates and started kind of walking around the ice.” By age four, Dylan was on a team for the first time.
Steve notes that “Cleveland is definitely more [of a] football, basketball, baseball type of town.” As a consequence and in search of stiffer competition, Dylan was playing against eight-year-olds by the time he turned six. Before long, Tyler, sixteen months younger than Dylan, was in that mix as well.
When Dylan was in sixth grade, Sharon and Steve Duke determined that the best option for their sons’ hockey careers was a move out of Ohio and to Northville, Michigan, where the boys would play together for Metro Detroit youth powerhouses Belle Tire and then Compuware.
Looking back on the move, Dylan feels grateful that his parents and sister Alyssa were willing to uproot their lives so that he and Tyler could get the best possible hockey opportunities (which of course necessitated a move away from Ohio). “My parents, my sister made a huge sacrifice for us to be able to come up here and play for Belle Tire and then eventually the USNTDP,” Dylan says. “It was a huge sacrifice that they all made for us, and I’m so grateful that we were able to do that and I had that opportunity.”
“There’s a lot of thought put into it,” explains Steve. “And I was fortunate enough with my job that I can live anywhere, and we just felt like it was the best thing for them at the time, and fortunately it’s worked out so far.”
To say Dylan’s career has “worked out so far” is an understatement. Whether with Team USA, at Michigan, or in his days of captaining youth teams to state and national championships, Duke stands out amidst rosters stacked with talent because of his willingness to do things that others won’t.
“He’s an elite teammate in terms of selfless play,” says Rand Pecknold, the head coach at Quinnipiac who will also lead Team USA’s World Junior side into Halifax and Moncton over the holidays. “He knows that ‘this [playing at the netfront] is my job; This is my role,’ and he’s got great buy-in to go do it. Not a lot of guys want to do that job. Everybody wants to play on the perimeter and be the skill guy, but he does a great job with that…He also does a really good job of puck hunting and retrieving pucks on the power play. That’s important. There’s a lot of loose pucks off rebounds or different players, and you gotta have guys that want to hunt and retrieve.”
Duke’s coach during the collegiate season defers all credit for his sophomore winger’s adeptness around the crease, instead attributing it to Duke’s own determination.
“I think he’s always really taken pride in that,” Naurato explains when asked what differentiates Duke around the net. “We’ve done some stuff in the summer back in the day or before practice tips, but that’s just him taking pride in it.”
Steve expresses a similar sentiment to Naurato. Though he coached his son until just before they moved to Michigan, he attributes his son’s success not to lessons from a father with pro experience but rather a natural affinity for the game. “You know with Dylan, he has such a love and passion for the game…He just loves the rink, being around the guys, the games, and he’s always been a leader.”
This notion is reinforced by the fact that, while Tyler tends to appear more tepid, Dylan grins in every one of the photos Steve was kind enough to pass along after our conversation.
There is, of course, a risk in referring to Dylan Duke as a “glue guy” of damning with faint praise. Something about the phrase implies that the player it describes’ gifts are not technical ability, tactical intelligence, or physical prowess.
For Duke—a first liner, starring on the Wolverines’ top power play—there can be no mistaking the sophomore winger’s skill, his off-ice value in addition to rather than in lieu of on-ice contributions.
“People would say for us, you have all this talent. That’s why it looks like you play a certain way” Naurato says. “My best clips, our identity clips, last year came from Nolan Moyle, Lambert, Van Wyhe, Samoskevich, Beecher, Duke.”
And, of course, the net-front tips or recovered loose pucks may look like good fortune to the untrained eye. However, as much as the hall-of-fame-worthy hockey cliché that if you want to score goals, go to the net holds merit, if any player could be as effective as Tomas Holmstrom at the goal mouth, they would do it.
Per Naurato, Duke succeeds in this area of the rink through a unique matrix of “body position, hand-eye coordination, playmaking five-feet in front of the net or five feet behind the net…and just the willingness to get there.”
In describing his tool belt in his own words, Duke—incapable of turning off the side of his character that led Pecknold to call him “the ultimate teammate”—doesn’t mention scoring goals. “I think it’s just a lot about body position and being in the right spots when pucks are delivered,” he contends. “I think the biggest thing is just finding ways to keep your hands loose and spin off guys and find loose pucks.”
For Steve, watching his sons’ hockey careers progress has more than justified the move to Michigan: “It’s been great, just all the time spent with them on the ice and off the ice—driving to tournaments, practices, and games. It’s been tons of fun and great to watch. They’re a lot better than I was, so it’s been a great ride so far. I’ve loved to watch a lot of the relationships that they built when they were six years old—best friends from Cleveland.”
When asked if he can pick a favorite memory from Dylan’s career, Steve turns to the Silver Sticks Tournament, when his son was just six. The tournament was played in Pelham, Ontario that year, but by its end, the Strongsville Mustangs of Strongsville, Ohio prevailed. “If you win the tournament, you actually win a silver stick,” Steve explains. “And he’s standing there, six-years-old, and holding the silver stick above his head. That was pretty neat.”
Of course, with Tyler now playing for the Buckeyes, the Duke family’s relationship to the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry is more muddled than ever. According to Dylan, “It just makes it confusing for everyone. Nobody really knows what to do.”
He adds that the Wolverines’ recent victory on the gridiron in Columbus afforded an opportunity for some good-natured banter with some of the friends and family he has yet to win over to the Michigan side of the rivalry: “I had the family group chat going, and then me and my brother have a group chat with all our best friends from back home in Ohio. There’s actually one other guy, Michael Boehm, who is on the lacrosse team here at Michigan and he’s from Cleveland, so me and him were stirring the pot and then all the other guys, they were down in Columbus at the game, and they were just not responding.”
Of course, Michigan fans won’t have to wait long before they get to watch the Wolverines and Buckeyes collide in an Ohioan football stadium again, with the two teams getting together in mid-February for the “Faceoff on the Lake” at the Browns’ FirstEnergy Stadium in Cleveland.
According to her husband, Sharon Duke has made plans for a split maize-and-blue and scarlet-and-gray jersey liable to offend loyalists on either side. Since Sharon hails from Ohio, there will be plenty of family on hand to see the brothers do battle. Steve estimates that “just with the Duke family, we’re going to have probably close to 400 people” in attendance. Since FirstEnergy Stadium lists its capacity at around 68,000, that figure suggests that about one in every one-hundred-seventy fans on hand will be Dukes.
Before the outdoor clash, Tyler and Dylan will meet in mid-January as Michigan hockey celebrates its 100th anniversary in the Wolverines’ return to Big Ten play after the holiday break. As someone who has seen the brothers compete since they were young enough to depend on their sticks for balance, Steve expects a spectacle:
“I’m sure those two are gonna battle pretty good when they play against each other. When they were little kids playing knee hockey, there were lots of holes in the basement from them going after each other, and I don’t expect any different when they play against each other in a college game.”
Thank you for reading Gulo Gulo Hockey! Thanks to Steve Duke for the photos you see here and for taking the time to speak with me. You can support our work further by subscribing or by giving us a tip for our troubles at https://ko-fi.com/gulogulohockey.