Why Is Harvard Hoops So Good?
Posted on February 23rd, 2012 in Uncategorized | 12 Comments »
Boston magazine profiles Harvard coach Tommy Amaker, and from what I can tell about the article, the main difference is not the caliber of the coaching, but the quality of the recruiting.
A few relevant selections:
“The feeling,” [Harvard alum and basketball supporter Tom] Stemberg says, “was if Duke could do it, and Stanford could do it, why not Harvard?”
...What is indisputable is that Amaker regularly goes after players [Frank] Sullivan, and every other Harvard coach dating back to the late 1960s, would never have approached. ….”They’re targeting top-100 guys,” Telep, the ESPN.com recruiting analyst, says of the caliber of players Harvard now tries to bring in. “They are the only ones in the Ivy League operating with this model. They’re selling Tommy as a players’ coach and Harvard as Harvard. They’ve had no fear in challenging or competing for [the kind of] player Harvard has never had before.”
Boston writer Peter May explains that the broadening of financial aid has helped by creating “de facto scholarships” when scholarships aren’t allowed for Ivy League sports.
But he doesn’t get into the question of whether Harvard has managed to find a way to lower its academic standards to find such players. We’d all like to believe that Harvard has managed to find a way to combine both athletics and scholarship at the highest level. But has there ever been a basketball program at a top-notch university that got this good without lowering academic standards?
12 Responses
2/23/2012 1:51 pm
Is it really fair to say that May “doesn’t get into the question of whether Harvard has managed to find a way to lower its academic standards to find such players”? I thought he addressed it explicitly when he said:
[i]The Times also reported that Harvard had bent its admission guidelines to accept players who wouldn’t have made it prior to Amaker’s taking over the program. The school disputed the story, and the league has said that the academic records of Harvard recruits “complied with all relevant Ivy League obligations.” … There have been no other incidents or allegations since.[/i]
2/23/2012 1:51 pm
Oops. I guess that wasn’t the command for italicizing…
2/23/2012 2:11 pm
Sean, I think it’s really an excuse for not digging deeper, frankly. (Which would be difficult, granted, given that academic records are confidential.)
The question to me is, How has Amaker lifted Harvard’s lame basketball program to Top 25 status in just a few years? Maybe he’s a really good coach, though there’s little sign of that in past experience. Expanded financial aid helps-but is it enough? Or maybe there’s just an abundance of really good basketball players with good enough grades. (Or maybe Harvard’s really good at finding diamonds in the rough, like Jeremy Lin, who are overlooked by other schools.)
I just didn’t think the piece answered that question.
2/23/2012 3:41 pm
From yesterday’s Crimson, re Moundou-Missi: “Juggling a rigorous course load that includes Physics 15b: ‘Electromagnetism’ and Applied Math 21b: ‘Mathematical Methods in the Sciences’ while playing basketball for a Crimson team that has stayed consistently near the top 25 teams in the country is no easy feat.” These are the courses that engineering majors take, not the watered down pre-med courses, much less science for nonscientists. And starting guard Rivard, #0, is a Computer Science major (and unlike at Yale, there is no math-lite track through CS here).
The AI is hard to play games with. This 2-pager doesn’t seem to be an Ivy League document in spite of having the Ivy League logo on it, and some of the numbers seem off. But it acknowledges that it is only an approximation so on a quick read seems pretty fair from what I remember of the system.
Bottom line: Yes, I think it’s recruiting. There is a very small pool of students with both the academic and athletic skills to get into Ivy institutions, given the norms set by the League. The pool for HYP is smaller than the pool for the others but students are more likely to accept an offer from one of these schools than the other 5 over an athletic scholarship offer from elsewhere, so in theory it evens out. I’m sure Amaker is glad that Yale’s 6’10” #44 is graduating, he came close to taking over the game last weekend-but Yale has a 6’11” freshman coming along behind, so the Ivy competition is definitely going to be hard for years to come. But the bottom line is that recruiting is both very scientific and very personal, and Amaker is very good at both.
2/23/2012 9:45 pm
This seems as good a place as any for a shout-out for my old freshman advisee Jeremy Lin
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/21/147217239/harvard-grad-cello-player-the-other-jeremy-lin
2/23/2012 10:23 pm
Way cool, RT!
Interesting article published yesterday in the YDN, taking a very different tack on Richard’s question. A transition to mediocrity. I am not sure this is completely right but it seems to have struck a chord — the comments are interesting to read.
2/23/2012 10:24 pm
Trying again: A transition to mediocrity
2/24/2012 6:46 pm
Of course, what is true about the relation between coaching and success for the team is also true for the relation between teaching and success for Harvard grads. Admit students of such high calibre and put them in a spot for four years and Don Rickles could teach all their courses and they would still do well. No knock on the faculty, just the nature of things.
2/24/2012 11:20 pm
You betcha.
2/27/2012 7:07 pm
Harry, In defense of pre-meds, I want to point out that most of us took Math 21-maybe times have changed?
2/28/2012 10:47 am
Med schools require only one year of calculus (Math 1). Good for you for doing more. Of course pre med is not a major - some premeds major in fields like chemistry that need another year. I should not have come across as belittling pre meds. But I doubt there are many winning basketball teams with actual players in 4th term calculus and honors physics.
9/2/2024 7:36 am
Harvard Dean Harry Lewis is able to find a few players on the Harvard roster with excellent academic credentials. I trust that he is also able to identify the four-star recruit out of Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles who was not able to score the Ivy League’s minimum Academic Index score. He was sent for a post-grad year at Northfield-Mount Hermon School which of course filled up the young man’s transcript with A’s, enabling him to be admitted to Harvard one year later. Even more interesting was a classmate of the recruit in question, who was recruited off the junior varsity team at Harvard-Westlake and then immediately dismissed from the Harvard roster upon his arrival in Cambridge. Obviously, no high school junior varsity player can compete for playing time at a Top 25 Division I program. No, this second young man was recruited solely so that his high SAT scores would be averaged into the Harvard team average. The second type of recruit is commonly called an “academic booster” and is how Harvard tries to paper over the lower scores of the players they really covet, the ones who actually see court time. I’m sure that Harvard Dean Harrry Lewis knows both of the young men in question, but does not seem to offer them up as examples that we Harvard alumni should be proud of.