Men’s Basketball Coach Tommy Amaker Built a Legacy at Harvard. Can It Last?
By Elyse C. Goncalves and Akshaya Ravi, Crimson Staff WritersCoach Tommy Amaker was hired to turn Harvard men’s basketball into a championship team. With a series of Ivy League titles and March Madness appearances under his belt, he hasn’t fallen short on that promise.
But with the introduction of cash to the world of college sports, that dream has become increasingly fraught — and Harvard’s basketball might be headed for a fitful awakening.
Amaker, who has been coaching at Harvard now for 17 seasons, has collected accomplishments with the men’s basketball team since his start in 2007. In his first five years on the team, he won the team’s first share of the Ivy League championship, which they proceeded to win four years in a row. He led Harvard to its first-ever victory in the first round of the National Collegiate Athletic Association March Madness tournament.
In 2016, Amaker became the winningest coach in Harvard history with 179 victories, and went on to achieve 300 victories with the team earlier in the 2024-25 season.
Legendary Duke men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, also known as Coach K, coached Amaker during his time as an undergraduate at Duke and mentored him when Amaker worked as his assistant coach. Krzyzewski said the talent Amaker brought to Harvard forced the Ivy League as a whole to step up its game.
“They saw how Tommy did it. They mimicked him,” Krzyzewski said.
But Harvard men’s basketball has struggled over the past five years, falling short of an Ivy Madness postseason run since 2019.
After going 21-8 in the 2019-20 season, Harvard basketball has struggled with subpar seasons, most recently finishing with a 12-15 record.
Kryzyzewski said Amaker “made his job tougher by being so good at his job” as the Ivy League caught up to Harvard, building stronger teams season after season.
Though the NCAA allowed athletes to profit off of their name, image, and likeness after a Supreme Court ruling in 2021, the Ivy League has taken a restrained approach, with alumni and the Ancient Eight making no coordinated efforts to pay students.
Last year, the team lost star point guard Malik O. Mack, who — following his freshman year at the College, where he was set to graduate in 2027 — decided to transfer to Georgetown, where he likely receives a large sum of NIL compensation.
While the remaining team — made up of a young group of players — is working to restore Harvard’s standing in the league having ended the season strong, NIL still looms large.
The Crimson interviewed nearly 30 current and former players and coaches, as well as experts — all of whom characterized Amaker as a different kind of coach: a mentor on and off the court. Yet many were concerned that Amaker’s charm would not be enough compared to cash and collectives at other schools.
Harvard Athletics spokesperson Imry Halevi wrote in a Thursday statement that despite the ever-moving world of NIL, Harvard intends to forge forward without directly compensating athletes.
“Our commitment to attracting high caliber student-athletes without financial inducements, and adhering to the Ivy principle that athletics is aligned with the educational purpose of the institution, remain unwavering,” Halevi wrote.
A New World of NIL
Since the NCAA allowed athletes to profit off of NIL, athletes began receiving thousands of dollars from donor-backed NIL collectives at universities and signing lucrative brand deals.
To Brendan Marks — who has covered college basketball for The Athletic since 2019 — the change in incentives has altered what it takes to recruit the best talent.
“The way it used to work is the kid would come in — high school or [transfer] portal, whatever — and you would talk about academics, and you would talk about the degree, and you would talk about the players you had sent to the NBA,” Marks said. “Now, that stuff is still there, but a lot of the time, the first question coming out of a kid’s mouth when he gets on campus is, ‘What am I getting? How much can I expect to earn here?’”
With life-changing money on the line, NIL has made college recruiting into a numbers game. At the University of Michigan, where Amaker coached before Harvard, the fan-funded Champions Circle collective has given millions to Michigan athletes.
Amaker said in an interview with The Crimson that schools across the country — not just Harvard and the Ivy League — are feeling the instability of recruiting and retaining players.
“Whether you’re Duke, Kentucky, Stanford, UCLA, Ohio State — you name the school — everyone is involved in trying to get a better understanding, or a footing here, where you can feel like there’s some stability,” Amaker said. “And I don’t know that anyone has been able to find that as of yet.”
But as many athletics departments become increasingly aggressive in their NIL offerings, Harvard and the Ivy League have taken a more cautious approach.
In January, the Ivy League announced it would opt out of a proposed NCAA settlement that would allow athletes to have direct compensation through revenue sharing.
Athletic Director Erin McDermott previously described Harvard as a “40-year opportunity, not a four-year opportunity” for athletes. Still, Marks believes that can be a hard sell to young athletes against the “immediate gratification and the potentially life-changing financial windfall” of playing at the best basketball programs.
“You’re asking them to choose something that’s not tangible versus something that is,” Marks said.
In an October interview, McDermott said the fact that Harvard does not offer NIL deals to athletes could affect the recruitment processes of low-income students, who may have to think more about immediate compensation than a Harvard degree.
Following the departures last year of Mack and fellow standout Chisom Okpara from the men’s basketball team, in addition to football player Cooper H. Barkate and tennis player Cooper Williams, alumni are increasingly concerned about keeping Harvard’s teams competitive.
Basketball at Harvard has proven particularly vulnerable to NIL competition. As a team that has cracked the Associated Press Top 25 poll in a sport with money flowing through it, and with other schools of a similar academic caliber dominating play, Harvard basketball has had to fight harder than ever for its most talented athletes.
In an April interview after Mack entered the transfer portal, McDermott said it was too early to understand the effects of NIL, but acknowledged that recent changes disproportionately affect men’s basketball.
‘Teach, Lead, Serve’
Oliver R. McNally ’12 was a member of the first class Amaker recruited to Harvard. At the time, the school hadn’t been successful in years.
But McNally was convinced when Amaker sat him down and detailed how he as an individual fit into the team’s plan for success. McNally said in the recruiting process, “most coaches are telling you a lot of things you want to hear,” but he felt Harvard was different.
“I believed in what they were telling me was going to happen, and it ended up actually coming through with us,” he said.
Amaker said honesty is what he values most in the recruitment process — adding that he is “never trying to sell Harvard,” but rather presenting it as an “opportunity and an option.”
“It’s Harvard. It’s a very powerful institution, and the brand of it is incredible across the globe,” Amaker said. “We have a huge responsibility and the privilege to present that to the right people.”
But Harvard’s appeal for athletes is not just the school’s brand. Amaker’s distinctive coaching — which former assistant coach Yanni Hufnagel called “cool, calm, and collected” — emphasizes efficiency and intention, according to his former players.
Amid tense moments or difficult stretches in games, Amaker can usually be seen calmly commanding the sidelines, a quality that has enabled his success for the past decade.
“Oftentimes the team takes on the personality of its head coach,” former assistant coach Brian Eskildsen said.
“He tries to act with an incredible amount of poise and composure, and I think that helps the team in close games,” he added.
Amaker has defined his legacy in equal parts on and off the court, redefining basketball coaching at Harvard in the process.
That started in his first season at Harvard in 2008, when Harvard Law School professors Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. and the late Charles J. Ogletree Jr. organized a Black leaders group called Tommy’s Kitchen Cabinet.
That group evolved into the Breakfast Club, which hosts monthly events where Amaker invites prominent speakers from basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Hufnagel said the Breakfast Club is one of many ways Amaker uses his own network to benefit those around him.
“Coach Amaker is as good of a connector and a builder of bridges as any person that I’ve met,” Hufnagel said. “The chance to go to Harvard, to play basketball at Harvard, and then to be a part of Tommy Amaker’s circle in perpetuity — that, to me, is just such a magical trifecta.”
J. Christian Webster ’13, a member of Amaker’s second class of recruits at Harvard and a current assistant coach at Virginia Tech, said Amaker was a life mentor to him as much as he was a coach.
“His motto — ‘teach, lead, serve’ — that he preaches a lot exactly embodies him,” Webster said. “He was literally the best teacher that I had in my time at Harvard.”
Amaker said his focus as a coach — and educator — lies off the court, in connecting his athletes to opportunities they wouldn’t get elsewhere.
“That’s what I think I can bring to the lives of the kids that we’re coaching, we’re teaching, and we’re leading,” Amaker said.
But it remains unclear whether Amaker’s mentoring will continue to be enough to draw star players to Harvard amid the growing allure of NIL compensation at competing teams.
The Long Run
When Amaker started during his time at Harvard, he told Webster that he wanted to build a championship team.
“He really just sold us a vision on, ‘We’re going to be an upstart team. We’re going to turn into a contender, then we’re going to be a winner, then we’re going to be champions,” Webster said.
Webster was offered the opportunity to change Harvard’s legacy and build a team with Amaker, something he said he couldn’t turn down. But he wasn’t inspired by the idea of victory alone — Amaker’s promise of academic excellence was a key influence as well.
Amaker came to Harvard motivated to build a nationally competitive basketball program at a school already renowned for its academics, without sacrificing one for the other.
Donny Guerinoni, who coached for Amaker from 2015 to 2022, said Amaker prioritized building a team of “scholars and ballers.”
Brian Eskildsen, who served as an assistant coach from 2014 to 2022, recalled recruiting Christopher W. Lewis ’20, who was interested in pursuing a degree in engineering.
Eskildsen, Amaker, and the team’s staff set up a four-year plan for Lewis during the recruiting process — from internships they could help him get to classes he’d have the opportunity to take.
Even now, with NIL controlling the conversation around recruitment, star freshman Robert T. Hinton ’28 in large part chose Harvard for the quality of its degree.
Hinton said that Amaker did not discuss NIL with him “at all” during his recruitment process.
“If a kid is curious about what money they’re going to get to come here, then I don’t know if their mind is in the right place,” Hinton said.
But while many alumni credit the incredible value of a Harvard degree, some of Amaker’s former players shared a concern with the diversion from NIL within the Ivy League.
McNally said that he was “very concerned with Ivy athletics being able to compete” without compensating players.
Krzyzewski explained that while Harvard can remain competitive within the Ivy League, it remains to be seen whether that success is sustainable in out-of-conference play.
“The Ivies are trying to stay pure, but that doesn’t mean the people around them are, so they’re going to still raid the Ivies if there’s somebody good,” Krzyzewski said.
To stay competitive, experts and alumni agree that Amaker may need to be more selective with the talent he recruits, vetting athletes to ensure they’re in the program for the long haul.
“Even though you might recruit that once-in-a-generation player to commit to Harvard, he’s got to want to say, ‘I’m staying here for four years,’” Boston Globe basketball reporter Gary Washburn said.
Basketball alum Andrew R. Pusar ’09 explained that while Harvard’s recruitment may need to be “more strategic and thoughtful,” he feels confident in Amaker’s ability to adapt.
“The combination of what Harvard has to offer, the improved prestige of the program — in large part because of Coach Amaker, and because of Coach Amaker being the quality, charismatic coach that he is — I think he has laid the framework to be able to continue that success,” Pusar said.
Christian A. Juzang ’20, an alum of the team, similarly said that there was “no coach in the world that I am more comfortable with at the helm,” despite the uncertainty of the current landscape.
Amaker himself plans on relying on the very quality that has followed him his entire career: consistency.
“Nothing has really changed in terms of how I’m going to present this incredible, life-changing opportunity,” he said. “The right kids will resonate.”
While the rules of the Ivy League disallow Amaker from dramatically changing his recruitment practices, Amaker said every team is looking for places to make adjustments.
Though Amaker plans to “rely on our principles and our people,” that doesn’t mean that the team will operate the same as always.
“We can get better. We can find ways to do things differently,” he said.
—Staff writer Elyse C. Goncalves can be reached at elyse.goncalves@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @e1ysegoncalves.
—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at akshaya.ravi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @akshayaravi22.