Zane Duncan gets to spend three weeks in the summer pursuing one of his many sports loves thanks to the Pilot Rocky Top Basketball League.
“It’s a way for me to stay involved in the game because basketball is in my blood,” said Duncan, a fifth-year coach in Knoxville’s top summer basketball league. “I didn’t really want to leave home, but I thought I wanted to be a basketball coach.”
Duncan is the coach of the Knoxville News-Sentinel squad in the Pilot Rocky Top League. He is the son of Representative Jimmy Duncan from Tennessee.
Despite not playing high school basketball for the Admirals, Zane is an avid basketball player and graduated from Farragut High School in 2004. He then started pursuing his other interests, which were hunting and fishing.
Duncan claimed to have participated in every sport as a child. “I played basketball, football, baseball, and soccer for a short while before deciding it wasn’t for me.
I’m an outdoorsman; I didn’t play basketball in high school because I enjoyed fishing and hunting.
He didn’t regain his love for hoops until he enrolled at Lincoln Memorial University.
Duncan explained, “I worked my way up from being a manager for the basketball team when I went to LMU to being a student assistant coach.”
Although Duncan chose the difficult route in collegiate basketball, he has experience coaching AAU basketball.
“Many late nights were spent washing uniforms,” he remarked. “We were the guys that worked hard and got up early; we were also nearly never the last to depart.
“It was difficult, but that is a necessary component of collegiate basketball.”
Currently married, Duncan works as a public relations officer for a local short-line train firm and has a 16-month-old kid. He stays busy with those parts of his life.
He still makes time for athletics, though. He not only coaches basketball but also plays tennis and golf.
“I play golf and tennis once in a while he said. “But I have a wife, a son and a dog and that keeps me pretty busy.
“The NBA Finals Games came on just after nine o’clock and I got my son to bed and got to enjoy some of those games.”
He’s become a fan of the San Antonio Spurs, the 2014 NBA World Champions, who play a unique brand of team basketball.
“I like the Spurs because I love teams who play team basketball,” he said. “In pro sports, you have a lot of superstars,” he said. “I love [San Antonio forward/center] Tim Duncan and I love [Spurs’ coach Gregg] Popvich and I like a lot of coaches.”
Zane Duncan remains an avid outdoorsman and he plans on passing his love of the outdoors to his son soon.
“I pretty much love anything to do with the outdoors and I plan on sharing that love with my son,” he said.
Basketball may be his biggest sports passion. But he’s a NASCAR fan. He also loves baseball and football. His family has held season tickets for the Washington Redskins. His grandfather (John Duncan Sr.) first bought those in the 1960s.
Zane once had an internship in the airline business in Washington, D.C. He began working in the nation’s capital when the Montreal Expos relocated to Washington and became the Nationals and he became a fan.
He still roots for LMU and is a fan of the University of Tennessee’s teams.
“I root for my alma mater but other than that, Tennessee is my only college team,” he said.
Like all of the Rocky Top League coaches, he looks forward to the three-week season and the draft.
“It [the draft] is the one time that we all get to sit around and socialize with each other,” Duncan said.
Leave a Reply