At Home with the Caputos
Duke lacrosse a family affair for veteran coach and his sons
Meredith Rieder, GoDuke The Magazine
This story originally appeared in the 14.9 Issue of GoDuke the Magazine – April 2023
There’s no place like home. Luckily for brothers Owen and Jake Caputo, every day at Duke carries a slice of it. Not only have they been able to experience the past four years as members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team together, they’ve also been fortunate enough to spend it with their father, Blue Devil assistant coach Ron Caputo.
“It’s cool because every single day I see my brother and my dad, which most people probably don’t get to say,” said Jake. “With our mom and sister pretty close by, I don’t really feel like I’m not at home when I’m here because half of my family is here, and I get to see them every day.”
Born 414 days apart, it’s always been Jake and Owen, the inseparable duo. While certainly their own individuals, they seemed to come as a pair.
“I don’t know if (my wife) Randi ever says Owen without Jake, or Jake without Owen,” said Ron Caputo. “It’s always Owen and Jake, Jake and Owen, Owen and Jake. They were always together.”
In fact, the first time they didn’t share a bedroom was when Owen left the house for his freshman year at Duke — an emotional day for everyone in the Caputo household.
“I think leaving the house that day was really emotional,” said Owen. “We’d been roommates our whole life and that was going to be the first time we’ve been separate from each other. He was only 45 minutes away so I could see him a decent amount and my dad was here too so it wasn’t too bad, but it was definitely emotional.”
“I remember Jake being really sad,” said Ron. “Owen’s senior year they lost in the (North Carolina high school) state championship game and they couldn’t stop crying on the field (afterward). Graduation hit soon after and then he was leaving (for Duke), so it was an emotional time in the house.”
Fast forward five years and Owen (now a graduate student) and Jake (now a senior) are integral pieces of the second-ranked Blue Devils who sport an 11-2 overall record and sit atop the ACC standings headed into the final days of the regular season, before beginning the quest for the program’s fourth NCAA title.
Owen is having the best season of his career with 13 goals and 13 assists for 26 points as the leader on the second midfield line. Jake, a defensive midfielder, is one of the anchors to the rope unit, the group that arguably has shown the most improvement since the 2022 season.
Their dad, in his 16th season on the sidelines for the Blue Devils, is the mastermind behind Duke’s stalwart defensive unit. An outstanding lacrosse mind, Ron has coached virtually every position on the field, working with the midfield group during Duke’s consecutive NCAA championships in 2013 and 2014, and then transitioning to defense in 2018.
Lacrosse was not always the top sport for Jake and Owen. Born on Long Island, they were more into basketball and football when they lived in Farmingdale, N.Y., according to Ron.
That quickly changed in 2007, when the Caputo family moved to North Carolina. They lived with friends initially while their house was being built. Their friends’ four children all played lacrosse, so naturally Owen and Jake gravitated to what their “cousins” were doing, and the rest is history.
Ron remembers the moment Jake and Owen suited up in all the equipment for the very first time in an indoor league at Dreamsports in Apex, N.C.
“Jake had a Hofstra lacrosse helmet on that he loved,” Ron remembers. “It was gold. Owen had a Duke helmet on and he wasn’t supposed to run on the field, and he ran out there and ran straight towards the ball. The (coach) was saying, ‘No! we have too many guys.’ That’s what I remember - him running out there and being so excited to do so.”
Jake and Owen developed a love for the game and spent hours in the backyard playing the two-man game and doing give-and-gos. Once they got a little older, they ventured to a nearby park with turf fields to work on their skills and give the grass in the yard a reprieve.
Ron remembers each one having a different affinity for lacrosse. Owen gravitated to the skills and flair that come with the sport, while Jake embraced the overall athleticism.
“Owen was always in the backyard playing, always (practicing his) stick skills,” Ron said. “He loved the creativity of it. He loved all of it. Jake was more of an all-around athlete. He wanted to play football, he wanted to play basketball, he wanted to play lacrosse, which is probably why now they play different positions.”
As they got older, it became apparent Jake and Owen both possessed the ability to play at a high level in college. When their dad told them that in order to go to a school like Duke, they needed to take AP classes, they took on that challenge at Middle Creek High in Apex. It was at that moment Ron knew they were prepared to make the sacrifices to be great.
Joining Team 91, an elite lacrosse club program, meant Jake and Owen were going to have to spend many weekends in the summer in a car rather than with friends.
“If you’re a young man or a young woman who is giving up your summer and the opportunities to go to the beach or the lake with your friends and anything else that goes with living down here, and instead you’re going to get into a car six weekends a year and drive to Long Island or to Baltimore, it’s important to you,” Ron said about his sons’ dedication to honing their craft.
It was always going to be Duke for Owen. He loved everything about the school. He had a picture of Duke star Matt Danowski in his room, wore the No. 40 jersey in honor of Danowski in middle school and No. 22 in high school for Ned Crotty, another former Duke great.
With Duke being the only school Jake had ever known, he wanted to explore other options, so he visited a couple of other schools to see what other opportunities looked like.
“I didn’t know (if I’d be able to play at) Duke for sure, but once Owen committed, I thought to myself, ‘Oh maybe it is possible,’” Jake said. “I was still very sure (I wanted to go to Duke), but since it was the only school I had ever seen I just wanted to see what another school was like. I visited two of them and I liked Duke better. I just needed something to compare it to.”
Getting to Duke wasn’t by accident for Jake and Owen. It took incredible work, some quality athletic genes — their mom, Randi, was a three-sport athlete in high school and two of her brothers played in the NFL and a third played football and wrestled at Brown — and a foundation of fundamentals established by their dad.
Sons of a coach, the brothers were playing and developing both hands from an early age and understood the importance of Duke lacrosse fundamentals — two-handed ground balls, turning to the outside, among the many non-negotiables within the Blue Devil program. Owen fondly looks back on a challenge from his dad, which in hindsight was a typical dad fib to fuel his competitive son.
“I would say having a dad as a coach you naturally learn fundamentals and IQ, specifically Duke lacrosse fundamentals,” Owen said. “Jake and I have been practicing with our off hand probably since we were in fifth grade. I remember specifically my dad told me when he was 12 or 13, he was equally as effective with both hands and I wanted to beat him so I pretty much practiced the entire summer with my left hand. Looking back at it, I don’t think that’s true because I don’t think my dad started playing lacrosse until he was older. I think he knew that would motivate me to work on my left hand.”
Ron remembers after a high school game when Owen picked up ground balls with one hand — two-handed ground balls only at Duke. So, when they got home, Ron had him pick up 50 two-handed ground balls with his right hand and 50 ground balls with his left.
While the fundamentals and understanding of the Xs and Os were important to Ron and Randi, most importantly they wanted to see their sons getting better on and off the field.
“When you watch your kids play and you’re a coach you certainly want to see them be the best versions of themselves, but you also want them to get better all the time,” Ron said. “When you are a Duke commit you get a lot of attention and sometimes that’s rough. I always took it as it’s just going to make them better. It makes you a better person. My dad used to say, and they’ve heard this from him, but my dad used to say as the father your job is to get them to heaven and not Harvard. You have to never lose sight of that.”
He takes this approach when coaching his sons. He doesn’t directly coach Owen as an offensive midfielder, but has watched assistant coach Matt Danowski do a great job of mentoring him. Danowski is tough on him, but at the other end of the field, Ron admits he also is hard on Jake. He never wants his sons to feel like they’re getting a pass on anything and it’s not that he’s any tougher on Jake than other players, but he knows he can push his son.
“I think I put guys that I know I can push in a box,” Ron said. “So I treat him pretty intensely because I know that I can. He’s in that box. It doesn’t have anything to do with his last name. It has to do with he’s in that spot — all those players know I love them deeply — and anything I say is going to be for their betterment.”
For this reason, Owen, who doesn’t interact with his dad much day-to-day at practice or in games, looks to his dad when he comes off the field after making a mistake.
“I probably gravitate towards him more after the bad plays just because I know he’ll have advice or something to tell me,” Owen said. “Sometimes after you make a bad play, you need someone to tell you what happened and to build you up and he’s always done that for me.”
Ron, reflecting on Owen’s comment, realizes they do lock eyes certain times throughout games. But for him, it’s the moments when all the dust settles that he enjoys the most.
“Having them homegrown and having Randi and Jayme be able to come to the games and to walk off the field and see my wife and my daughter and see (Jake and Owen) hug their mother, that is probably a quiet satisfaction I don’t acknowledge enough. I feel like that is one of the most unappreciated things for all three of us.”
The Caputos will have that quiet satisfaction a few more times as the Blue Devils’ 2023 season winds down. A few more runs together for the trio and whether in Durham or on the road, it will always be home.
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