DURHAM, N.C. (AP) – Joanne P. McCallie sat in her office at Duke earlier this week when a surprise visitor dropped by: men’s coach Mike Krzyzewski.

Leave it to Coach K to bring some levity to her team’s surprising losing streak.

“He was saying that (the men once) lost to some teams that weren’t highly ranked,” McCallie said Wednesday. “He was joking with me, ‘You’re playing Connecticut, Vanderbilt. Heck, we were playing (worse teams), so let’s be real.’ It was tongue-in-cheek, but he was right.”

The exchange gave McCallie, who coached at the University of Maine for eight years, a brief reason to chuckle amid a difficult start her tenure at Duke. Injuries, graduation losses and a brutal early-season schedule have conspired to drop the 17th-ranked Blue Devils (5-3) out of the top 10 for the first time since 2001.

They’re on their first three-game losing streak since 1997 and, with No. 4 Rutgers visiting Thursday night, are hoping to avoid their first four-game slide since 1994 – unfamiliar territory for a program that under previous coach Gail Goestenkors had seven straight 30-win seasons and reached four Final Fours.

“The only thing you can do is go up from there,” senior guard Wanisha Smith said. “When you lose three games in a row, it’s kind of like we hit rock bottom, but at the same time, we’re just getting better, and we’ll be fine.”

Perhaps a return to Cameron Indoor Stadium is just what the Blue Devils need. Duke has played just one of its first eight games on its home floor, an 84-39 thumping of UNC Greensboro. In a tournament in the Virgin Islands, the Blue Devils beat Purdue and Temple before losing to No. 2 UConn, then dropped games at No. 20 Vanderbilt and Penn State.

“I looked at the schedule (before the season) and I went, ‘That is a funny schedule,’ but I didn’t think much more of it,” McCallie said. “You know how some coaches go down the schedule (saying) ‘Win that one’? I don’t do that. You can’t do that, because who has time to do that?”

When McCallie took over for the Texas-bound Goestenkors last spring, she knew she had two huge holes to fill with the graduation of point guard Lindsey Harding and center Alison Bales.

Harding, the Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year, won the Naismith Award as the nation’s top player 5-foot-8 or under, while Bales, the most prolific shot-swatter in Duke and ACC history, fell one shy of the NCAA single-season record of 152.

“How many teams lose two All-Americans? Name one,” McCallie said. “It’s so funny to me how people escape the fact that we used to have a 6-7 kid cover the paint and a point guard who, in my opinion … Lindsey Harding had the best senior year I’ve ever seen of any player, period. … Whatever people think, it’s a lot of loss on the defensive end, it’s a lot of leadership lost at point guard.”

Then, things got even tougher when several key Blue Devils suffered injuries of varying severity.

Abby Waner, the team’s leading returning scorer, missed four games with a sprained left ankle and her return coinicided with the three-game slide.

Smith likely will miss her third straight game Thursday with a broken bone in her right hand. Freshman center Krystal Thomas is expected out for three weeks with an injured left kneecap.

“It does get frustrating, but at the same time, it’s one thing that helps me, personally, because I get to see different things that are going wrong or things that I can say to my teammates at time-outs to help them,” Smith said. “I’m trying to be the biggest cheerleader for my team and do whatever it takes to get my teammates prepared.”

But there doesn’t seem to be any panic in these Blue Devils. They started last season 30-0 before making abrupt exits from the ACC and NCAA tournaments – the latter at the hands of Final Four-bound Rutgers.

This time, they hope to get their poor games out of the way in November and December, then build toward a strong March.

“We’re tough, and we’re going to get knocked down, but we don’t dwell on it, because we know that’s not going to help us,” Waner said. “You have to be truthful and objective, look at the films the next day. It’s not easy to swallow, looking at you getting beat every single time one-on-one. But you learn from it, you adjust things. We’re not worried. We’re not desperate. We’re getting better.”

AP-ES-12-05-07 2237EST