Tommy Amaker…Jerk?
Posted on September 29th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 23 Comments »
The Times continues its reporting on Harvard’s attempt to transform its basketball program into something decidedly un-Ivy League.
After being mysteriously (try to find some details) cleared of alleged recruiting violations by the NCAA, Harvard coach Tommy Amaker recently summoned five players, recruited by his predecessor, to his office and told them that they were all off the team. This was before practices had started, but after it was possible for the players to transfer to another school. Amaker would be replacing them with seven freshmen whom he had recruited.
Amaker’s decision to cut the players recruited by his predecessor — while not unusual outside the Ivy League — has raised eyebrows in the conference and has angered the players, their parents and coaches. Their main point of contention is that Amaker did not allow the players to compete for spots, going against the university’s athletic mission statement, and instead cleared them out to make room for his own players.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s PR department served up its usual meal of total bullshit.
Harvard’s associate director of athletics, Sheri Norred, said, “While the department is obviously sorry to disappoint any student-athlete, even with necessary roster changes, we have the utmost confidence in Coach Amaker’s ability to judge talent and treat his athletes fairly.”
Why not just cut that sentence off after the word “talent”? It’s obviously not true that Amaker has treated these athletes fairly. To insist that he has is either stupid or dishonest.
Meanwhile the coach himself shows that he is no profile in courage.
Amaker did not return a call to his cellphone or an e-mail message.
The AD also shows that he is a stand-up guy.
The athletic director, Bob Scalise, did not return a telephone message.
Way to act like role models for your students, gentlemen.
“Everything that Harvard stands for is character and standards for academics,” said Rob Pavinelli, who coached one of the jettisoned players, T. J. Carey, at St. Dominic High School in Oyster Bay, N.Y. “To me, not giving the kids a chance to compete seems like it goes against everything that Harvard believes in.”
Does Harvard really care so much about a winning basketball team that it’s willing to compromise its values?
23 Responses
9/29/2008 9:59 am
It’s funny, I did get a message last night from the jerk store, saying they were looking for Amaker.
This sounds like SERIOUS jerk behavior. Not that these kids (presumably upperclassmen) were going to transfer out of Harvard — schools of commensurate quality don’t really take athletic transfers very readily. But the time to cut players is in the spring, before they spend the summer training.
On the other hand, here’s my surmise. Why hasn’t this been in the Crimson? Why aren’t they quoted directly in the article? Cause these five guys haven’t done much complaining. My guess is that they weren’t all that committed to the team and didn’t work hard over the summer. So this may be less of a big deal than it seems, and the secondhand insight from a high school coach may be inaccurate.
As the story stands I find it absolutely shocking. Each student-athlete should be treated as an INDIVIDUAL, and yes, they should have a chance to compete for their spots.
SE
9/29/2008 12:17 pm
St. Dom’s in Oyster Bay? Ay yi yi.
9/29/2008 2:03 pm
Shouldn’t we start by wondering whether it’s really all that unusual?
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/10/25/sports/13589.shtml
sdk
9/29/2008 2:19 pm
Sean,
As you can tell, the circumstances are entirely different; players had been warned at the end of last season that there would be cuts, they were warned at the beginning of this season, they were cut after four practices, and there were only two cuts. Plus, the cuts were not entirely of players recruited by the prior coach, as they were in this case.
Sorry, but I don’t think the analogy is useful.
9/29/2008 3:41 pm
Richard,
I’m having a hard time understanding your position: you seem to want to have your cake and eat it too.
Either it’s a bad thing to wait until the fall semester to cut someone, because then they can’t transfer, or it’s a good thing because you have some sense for how they’ve progressed. But you can’t have it both ways. Earlier you were concerned that it occurred too late for them to transfer. But that’s true about the Princeton case too. So now you’re concerned that it’s happened before practice has started. Um, isn’t there some principle about keeping your standards?
Besides, let’s suppose it’s better to wait until you can see how the players have progressed. Then the difference between the cut happening after four practices and its happening right before practice starts seems to me basically irrelevant. Especially if at least some of the players involved have been at your basketball camp for all of August. Surely that’s enough to know how things have progressed.
Also, you’re wrong about the numbers. If you read the Princeton article you’ll see that there were five players involved. Two of them were cut outright, and the other three decided to stay on the team nominally despite being assured they wouldn’t play. Not officially cut, but not much different from that at all.
Finally, I don’t understand at all why it should matter that the players were recruited by someone else. If anything, it’s a greater insult to cut one of your own recruits than someone else’s.
Look, I’m not saying this was a great act. And I know precisely nothing about it beyond the Thamel article, so for all I know it could be just awful. But I am troubled by how quickly you jump to the conclusion that there’s something nefarious here. As Standing Eagle suggests, there are an awful lot of possible explanations. With 7 highly touted recruits and 15 slots on the travel roster, everyone should have expected some shake-ups. But given Pete Thamel’s recent history, it seems like a lack of fairness on your part to slavishly accept his account of the situation.
sdk
9/29/2008 3:45 pm
Perhaps then either the coach or the AD should have responded to the reporter’s inquiries, Sean.
What about Pete Thamel’s recent history are you referring to?
9/29/2008 4:22 pm
Sean,
Why all of a sudden, seven highly touted recruits?
Coach Amaker comes out of Duke’s basketball program, a very major college program, perhaps “the” major. He goes to Seton Hall which wanted to resurrect a major program. He leaves abruptly for University of Michigan, a major college program. Fails to meet expectations and is fired at U of M. Hired by Harvard. Questions about his recruits and his recruiting. Recruiting questions answered favorably. About recruits: does he really understand Ivy League standards or has Harvard changed its academic standards with regard to men’s basketball recruits?
9/29/2008 4:26 pm
Perhaps they should have talked to the press, Richard. Or perhaps it’s better not to get dragged into a public discussion about whether you’ve stopped beating your wife. I really don’t know. I trust your judgment here much more than my own, so I really would be interested to hear more about what you think. It seems to me a very complicated issue about what a University’s obligations are to the press.
As for Pete Thamel, I meant to be referring to your call that he revisit his allegations about recruiting violations from the Spring. Especially in light of the Ivy League’s report. This article hardly seems like a mea culpa.
I’ve said this once already, but let me be as clear as I can: I am not defending Amaker, in this incident or otherwise. I don’t know the details, and in a certain way it doesn’t seem like it’s much of my business. Moreover, I certainly feel for the student-athletes who are caught up in the situation. I completely get that this is a tough situation. But let’s be honest: kids get cut from the varsity team all the time. Heck, it’s a rite of passage in many lives. But does it deserve to make the NYT? It feels to me in this situation like it’s being reported only because it can be spun to fit a pre-existing narrative. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But that’s what gives me pause.
sdk
9/29/2008 4:33 pm
Sam writes:
About recruits: does he really understand Ivy League standards or has Harvard changed its academic standards with regard to men’s basketball recruits?
I think it’s a fair question - it’s certainly worth asking. I don’t know the answer for sure. But I don’t think anybody writing about it does either, and they all seem to have very strong opinions.
sdk
9/29/2008 4:47 pm
I’ll agree with you that the Times sports section seems to have a jones for Harvard.
But then, every other section in the Times writes about stuff at Harvard basically because it happens at Harvard, so why should sports be any different?
9/29/2008 5:04 pm
For some reason, Sean, that came out as you having written it, when of course it was me. Sorry! No idea why.
9/29/2008 6:31 pm
Richard,
My concern isn’t so much that the Times sports section is reporting about Harvard. It is that they are reporting badly.
sdk
9/29/2008 8:53 pm
Cutting team members in the fall without warning that cuts were coming is bad. Cutting them WITH warning is very very different, because they have a chance to train all summer and compete for their spots. Their inability to subsequently transfer (again, not that that was on the table for these guys) is then not the fault of the program, which warned them that they were on thin ice and would have to compete.
I’m in favor of competition. In 1994, one of my best friends lived in Winthrop House for the summer and trained three or four hours a day in order to come back and compete for her spot on the Princeton basketball team. She embodied class. She almost never got minutes in actual games but that is VERY different from being cut.
To believe that not having playing time in games is the equivalent of being cut shows a real lack of understanding of Ivy League sports.
SE
9/29/2008 11:40 pm
Standing Eagle writes:
To believe that not having playing time in games is the equivalent of being cut shows a real lack of understanding of Ivy League sports.
I’m not quite sure how to take this. It sounds suspiciously like the kind of ad hominem attack we’re always worried about in philosophy class. As always in the case of an ad hominen attack it’s not obvious what counts as an appropriate response. But let me just state for the record that if I have a real lack of understanding of Ivy League sports, which I may, then it is not from any lack of experience with them.
Look, I admit there is room for discussion here, and I certainly admire the contributions that SE makes in general. Naturally, that goes for Richard’s contributions too. I genuinely want to know what you guys think. But leaving aside the ad hominen attack I’m concerned that the latest argument is based on an unsubstantiated premise. Nobody says anywhere in the article that I read that there was no warning that there would be cuts. Indeed, given the circumstances I suppose it would have been obvious that something was likely to happen.
I do admit the point that for some people it is much worse to be cut than to stay on the team but not compete. And I have every confidence that SE’s friend embodied class in her particular situation. But I have known plenty of people who stayed on the team and might just as well have been cut for all they got out of it. And after the fact they recognized that. My main point is that without knowing the details we can’t tell which category these cases fall under. And that makes all the difference.
[I admit too that this may affect my account of the numbers involved in the Princeton case. Nevertheless, I still think it’s at least prima facie a relevant analogy.]
Let me emphasize once again that I am not defending Amaker’s actions. For all I know this was an awful move on the part of the coach, indeed an awful way to coach a team, an awful way to treat student-athletes. I don’t know. What bothers me is that people feel like they have the right to such strong opinions when it’s not at all obvious what the situation is.
sdk
9/30/2008 9:39 am
“for some people it is much worse to be cut than to stay on the team but not compete”
Okay then, we don’t disagree. Sorry if I seemed to be coming at you personally, rather than your opinion.
I’d argue that the ethos of college athletics in general strongly militates against the idea that being off a team is the same as not getting playing time. TEAM is just a much larger concept than that.
What makes you think that playing time is the primary motivator for any substantial fraction of Ivy League athletes?
SE
9/30/2008 10:44 am
“Cutting team members in the fall without warning that cuts were coming is bad. Cutting them WITH warning is very very different,”
I see that Sean thinks that I think the former is the case at Harvard. I don’t know which it is, I was just pointing out that they’re very different things.
9/30/2008 12:02 pm
Thanks for the clarification, SE. I did assume you were proposing an interpretation of what had actually happened in the Amaker case, but I now see I was wrong to think that.
Leaving aside what actually happened in this one instance, I think you’ve pushed us to an interesting question about what really motivates, or maybe what really ought to motivate, Ivy League athletes to want to join a team. A question, as you put it, about the “ethos of college athletics”. Your suggestion, as I see it, is that the primary motivation is (ought to be?) essentially tied to being part of a team - regardless of what role you play on it. I don’t deny that there is something great about this. Still, it doesn’t seem to me this can be the whole story.
Admittedly, my intuitions are tutored by my experience with swimming, which is very much an individual sport even in the context of college athletics. But it seems to me that in this case an extremely important consideration is whether the team is operating at a level commensurate with your talents. I have friends who swam on college teams where the level of competition was way too high for them, and they were miserable and ultimately quit. They quit because, in virtue of their not being able to contribute they felt less a part of the team. Likewise, I have friends who were the absolute stars of college teams that were well below their talent level. They felt somehow as if they were cheating, and did not treasure the experience either. The people who had the most successful experiences were the ones who not only were on the team, but who were able to contribute to its success in a reasonable way. I don’t say this is the only consideration. But I know that in choosing colleges it played, and probably ought to have played, a central role for me and my cohort.
Perhaps there is a strong difference here between traditional team sports and traditional individual ones. Maybe it matters less to the baseball players, for instance, that it looks like there’s a spot for them as a starter on the team. I’d be surprised to find this is the case, but I’m ready to be educated. Thoughts?
sdk
9/30/2008 12:47 pm
Yes, team sports are quite different. And in fact swimming is perhaps the LEAST team-oriented of all sports. Runners set the pace for each other, and ‘rabbits’ can be helpful at phases of a race even if they’re not competitive at the finish. Squash players practice against each other, and run drills. In almost every sport there is an important contribution for the team member who isn’t competitive intercollegiately. Even shot throwers need workout partners to keep them organized and lighten the atmosphere.
My own perspective is that I stood in as a Cornell defensive end, or a Navy linebacker, to help my team (Princeton lightweight) prepare for their offenses. I was not a good player but played my hardest in every practice.
Fundamentally in almost every sport you don’t have to directly increase the chance of beating the other team in order to “contribute to [the team’s] success in a reasonable way.” Swimming is much more the exception than the rule.
SE
9/30/2008 12:51 pm
“Maybe it matters less to the baseball players, for instance, that it looks like there’s a spot for them as a starter on the team.”
The other thing you’re leaving out is that people come to college to LEARN. So they expect to improve from year to year and can’t know when they’re coming in whether they’ll THREE YEARS LATER have the skill to be a starter. Coaches are educators rather than personnel managers.
In most cases though players who find out they’re not ever going to start have by then already developed a strong commitment to their team and their role on it. Plenty of athletes quit their sport, to be sure, and many of those have learned that they won’t get much PT — but this is a great case of correlation rather than causation. Players who are undermotivated to improve are more likely BOTH to stagnate at the bottom of the depth chart AND to decide to quit their teams.
And more power to ’em, if they’ve got other priorities that are valuable.
Standing Eagle
9/30/2008 5:11 pm
I can see that you have different motivating intuitions than I do, SE, and I’m happy to concede that some student-athletes may well have your intuitions and others mine. I’m not sure, however, that I buy your strong claim that my intuitions are unique and unusual because swimming is unlike all the other sports. After all, swimmers also pace one another, practice against one another, run drills, and lighten the atmosphere. Whatever explains the difference in our intuitions, I don’t think it can be that swimming is unlike every other sport.
sdk
9/30/2008 5:22 pm
I wouldn’t say it’s qualitatively different, but I would say it’s much less team-oriented than average. As I say I can’t think of another sport that’s essentially more isolating — don’t swimmers practice against the clock more than against each other? And don’t they have less down time between tasks, and less time in the weight room, than any of the field athletes?
If they pace each other in practice then that’s something. But unlike cross-country they can’t pace each other in actual competitions.
Buddy of mine wrote the GREAT college cross-country book, _Running with the Buffaloes_. Very highly recommended.
I am happy to let our intuitions go their separate ways, but I am puzzled by this statement: “Likewise, I have friends who were the absolute stars of college teams that were well below their talent level. They felt somehow as if they were cheating, and did not treasure the experience either.”
I don’t understand that feeling. Why did they feel they were cheating? What sport was this?
SE
9/30/2008 5:26 pm
“But I have known plenty of people who stayed on the team and might just as well have been cut for all they got out of it. ”
This also I don’t understand. Did they truly not get out of it social or time-structuring benefits? How did they fail to notice that it was not just an opportunity cost but a net negative, or zero?
Seems strange to me.
SE
9/30/2008 8:54 pm
SE,
Swimming, like all other sports, has many complicated rituals. No doubt they have developed since I was involved as an athlete, though watching from the other side I see a clear lineage with the sport I knew. Still, to describe them in detail here is probably too much to hope for. Suffice it to say that it is almost certainly much less isolating than non-swimmers suppose: the loneliness and boredom that recreational swimmers complain about are simply not a part of the sport as I knew it. Practices are *very* much a group effort, and what the other people on the team are doing has a strong effect on the way most people train. Indeed, I think this has something to do with why it matters so much that you are well-suited to the level at which the team competes. Paradoxically, this may help to explain my intuition about the relation between being cut and not participating.
I know there are other issues hanging, and I’d be very happy to continue this discussion off-line - I’m finding it very interesting. But perhaps it’s not appropriate to continue at this level of detail on Richard’s blog. Let me know…
sdk