More on Tommy Amaker
Posted on September 30th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
On reflection, I think it was unfair of me to make yesterday’s post on Harvard basketball a referendum on whether Tommy Amaker is a jerk. I don’t know enough about the issue to make it so personal. And in any event, Amaker’s personality isn’t the real issue. My apologies, Mr. Amaker.
(Though I still believe that, no matter how much Amaker and AD Bob Scalise may not like Times reporter Pete Thamel, they should talk to him, rather than foist off the responsibility on an associate AD, as they did.)
But the larger issue, of course, is what kind of basketball program Harvard wants, and whether that sort of program is so important to the university that it will compromise the traditional values of Ivy League athletics.
Here’s an excerpt from a blog called Hoops Addict that sums up the situation from that perspective:
Amaker’s presence and his and his athletic director’s assertion that Harvard Basketball is taking a new direction - an investment in winning - makes for more pressure for all the other Ivy League coaches. It is a proclamation that the Ivies are joining the big-time.
And this forces the coaches from the Ivies to join the NCAA basketball universe of the 21st century. They must actively recruit players from regions around the country that are, perhaps, outside of their comfort zones. They must ask for more money from the university and from boosters to conduct their business. This means glad-handing, doing rounds of speaking engagements, and even attending corporate and political mixers, which is the rarified air inhabited by well-heeled Ivy League boosters.
The question this all raises is why? Honestly, who cares whether Harvard has an elite basketball program? Isn’t the university creating a product for which there is no significant demand—and potentially compromising itself in the process?
4 Responses
9/30/2008 7:39 am
Richard,
That is the question… “what kind of basketball program Harvard wants.”
I don’t have the details in front of me, so some of what I say may be a slight bit off, but the gist will be correct. At least one person who writes on this blog can, and I hope will, correct any mistakes.
A number of years ago, my late friend Jeremy Knowles, was talking to me about scholar athletes. He knew I was interested in the subject because of my interest in track and field.
He told me about a report that was commissioned. Among many other things, it looked at the SAT scores of Harvard sports teams. This was a report that many people at Harvard wanted buried. It showed that athletes on four teams (or was it only three?), men’s and women’s ice hockey, women’s basketball, and football, had scores significantly (two standard deviations?) below their entering classes. Other sports did not have this large a disparity and many sports had none at all or had, in fact, athletes who were above the class norms.
The question he asked me was why do we do it? He wasn’t in any way slighting the athletes on these four teams. He wanted to know why it was necessary to do this for these four teams. Of course, Jeremy came from Oxford where the money spent on sports is minimal and so his natural inclination was to look askance at all of it (although I did convince him to attend a track meet with me and he enjoyed it).
He wasn’t suggesting that The FAS cut down drastically on money spent on varsity athletics (although he would have liked it cut somewhat), but was just wondering why Harvard allowed this disparity for four teams.
Scholar athletes, including those on the teams mentioned, are very important to Harvard. They are among the hardest working students, students who have incredible dedication and focus. They excel in the classroom as well as on the field. They are incredibly loyal to Harvard.
I think the question is: is the new recruitment policy of the Harvard’s men’s basketball team lowering standards, from the standpoint of quantifiable scores, and is this a good thing for Harvard?
Again, I do not have the report with me and will be happy to be corrected on any fact that is wrong.
9/30/2008 7:41 am
Richard,
This sounds to me like a perfectly legitimate, indeed important, set of questions. Thanks.
One note to get the conversation started: it’s not obvious from the excerpt you post that the concern should be about the intention to win per se. Indeed, there are many teams at Harvard that compete at a much higher level than the basketball team does, and nobody is concerned about them. In such cases either the team itself competes on a national or international level (crew, squash) or it has numerous individuals who do (swimming is an obvious example, but there are others too).
Instead of competitiveness per se, the Hoops blog excerpt seems to be concerned with what it takes to be competitive in the basketball nowadays. (Fundraising, glad-handing, boosters, and so on.) I wonder whether these things bear a contingent or a necessary connection to success in basketball.
Also, can you or others say what you consider to be “the traditional values of Ivy League athletics”? I’d love to know if there is consensus on this. To lay my own cards on the table, it seems to me to have something to do with the idea of living a balanced life in which athletics plays a role, but not the only or even the central role. In short, something like the old idea of the amateur athlete. I’m not committed to this account of Ivy League values but it does seem to characterize, for instance, Bill Bowen’s ideal, and I certainly see the appeal. Under that description, though, I’m worried that the traditional values departed long ago.
sdk
9/30/2008 9:32 am
I don’t see ANY basis at this point for believing that something new is happening here. There’s a new coach who wants to put his stamp on the team (and acted like a jerk, apparently). But until a) the *admissions office* signals a drastic shift in standards; or b) the team begins practicing a LOT more (and studying a lot less), there is no prospect of any paradigm shift in Ivy hoops.
A few years ago Princeton basketball ranked as high as twelfth in the nation; I don’t think this created extra pressure on the other Ivy coaches. And the idea that Ivy coaches haven’t ALREADY been recruiting their tucheses off (ooh! travel ‘outside their comfort zone! horrors!) is ridiculous. The problem with getting top players is simply that they tend to go to places where there are fewer other demands on players’ time (like school); also, they don’t tend to get in.
Moreover, as long as the college has a robust culture of its own no subculture of athletics-above-all can thrive among a small subset of students.
Harvard women’s basketball was a 15 seed and knocked off Stanford in the tournament while I was a Resident Tutor in Lowell House. The players involved were fully a part of the community, and were very good students. Allison Feaster, one of the most successful players in women’s basketball history, was a terrific leader and that squad in the mid-nineties could really PASS the ball.
No anecdotal scenario should be taken to indicate a paradigm shift.
I think the Hoops Blog guy is disconnected from the campus reality.
Does anyone have evidence that Amaker is doing something that will actually affect the campus sports culture? What am I missing here?
Standing Eagle
9/30/2008 10:43 am
To clarify — the Feaster era was separate from the Stanford game.
SE
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