'BAMA SLAMMA: Six Degrees of Will Frank

Think you’ve got it tough?

It’s March Madness Eve. As you read this with your breakfast, kids like you will be scribbling incomprehensible place names on coffee-stained pieces of scrap. The process is about as painless as a Mansfield midterm.

Who to pick? Loyalties clash with realities. In other words, if you hail from Niagara, there’s still no way you’re writing the Purple Eagles into the Sweet Sixteen.

For hoops fan Will Frank ’06, busting the bracket of the 2005 NCAA Tournament is a whole different ballgame.

“Sadly,” says the Dunster House junior, “I’ll have Syracuse losing to Duke, probably. Reverse psychology.”

Frank is an unassuming fellow. He’s tall and athletic, but you wouldn’t necessarily pin him for a basketball player. He doesn’t play organized ball, not even JV—“too lazy,” he says—but takes care of his work like any normal Harvard student would.

He’s no normal Harvard student.

“There are people who you can say, ‘I played with Hakim Warrick’ and it means nothing to them,” Frank says, grinning. “Which is a shame.”

Lest you belong to the unlucky few, let’s just say that Hakim Warrick is, with apologies to Ron Burgundy, kind of a big deal. In sports fan circles, at least, the immensely talented Syracuse forward belongs to the pantheon of Household Names.

Warrick could be a top-5 pick in this summer’s NBA Draft. Within months, he’ll be a multi-millionaire. On the court, the 6’8 forward’s seven-foot wingspan—Warrick has “go-go gadget arms,” says Frank—has sent opponents’ shots off course with all the reliability of a bullet train.

“Yeah he would block me,” Frank says. “All the time.”

“But actually,” he adds, “the first time I ever played against him, I didn’t think he’d be that good. And I drove to the lane that summer. And he just swatted the hell out of me.”

Indeed. In the corner of Dunster House lives a living wonder—the Forrest Gump of March Madness, the Kevin Bacon of hoops stars.

At Friends Central, a small Quaker high school in Philadelphia, Frank started on a team that turned out four NCAA Division I hoops phenoms, two Division II standouts, and three Division III players.

His senior year, he captained a team whose point guard was Mustafa Shakur, now the starter at point for Arizona, a title contender in the Chicago region. That same year, his team’s biggest rival was Germantown Academy, whose two starters were Florida star Matt Walsh and Duke regular Lee Melchionni.

“I’ve just been really lucky, like, randomly meeting people,” Frank says.

And so when tourney time begins tomorrow on CBS, Frank’s investment will be personal.

Just like it was last year.

“John Lucas, before he moved to Texas, lived in Philadelphia,” says Frank of Oklahoma State’s star guard, who just may lead the No. 2 Cowboys to a possible Sweet Sixteen matchup against Shakur’s Wildcats. “I guarded John Lucas in our winter league basketball games all the time. And he was really small but just so incredibly quick. And then last year he hit the game-winner against St. Joe’s [to advance to the Final Four], which sucked.”

The stories, and Frank is full of them, are so ludicrous that you periodically question them. In the end, they are real because Philadelphia makes them possible. The City of Brotherly Love has produced NBA notables like two-time All-Star Rasheed Wallace (Simon Gratz High School) and Kobe Bryant (Lower Marion).

And then there’s Warrick.

“We would hang out, like, in the cafeteria,” Frank says. “My favorite [story] was my friend and I brought him to this three-on-three little suburban tournament.”

Long story short: “We won the tournament,” he laughs.

It wasn’t always so easy for Frank’s “really nice, really quiet” teammate. Virtually unwanted during his junior year at Friends Central—“Penn, Drexel, St. Joe’s, Villanova…none of them really recruited him,” Frank says—Warrick turned legendary Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim’s head as a late fill-in at a summer All-Star camp.

When N.C. State star Julius Hodge spurned Syracuse for the Wolfpack, Boeheim offered Warrick a spot at the last minute.

Before announcing his intentions to a gaggle of media, Warrick told his Friends teammates he was off to Syracuse.

“Coach wanted him to tell his extended family first,” Frank says.

Not long after, a Philadelphia TV News crew caught Warrick’s moves on tape.

“And he was doing the most amazing dunks ever,” Frank says. “And that’s when I knew like he could be…like he was doing 360s in high school!”

Unlike Warrick, Shakur was an early bloomer. Rated the No. 1 high school point guard in the country, Shakur attracted so much interest that Frank felt it.

“I guess the funniest thing is Jay Wright, the coach of [No. 5 seed Villanova],” Frank says. “He wanted Mustafa so badly that he let us practice in Villanova’s gym a couple of times. He knew all the players on our team by name. He came up to me and congratulated me for getting into Harvard. When I’d never seen him before. That’s how badly they wanted Mustafa.”

Frank encountered all the coaching legends—Hall of Famers Boeheim, Temple coach John Chaney, Arizona coach Lute Olsen—but was one of only a couple of players on the team who didn’t get a look. He drew interest from Susquehanna and Slippery Rock, he says, and Haverford and Swarthmore, “but I just decided I’d rather come here.”

And so tomorrow, Frank will find his web of Tournament loyalties even more complicated than most.

He’s definitely got it tough.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.