Amaker Makes a Winning Program

November 9, 2007.

The Harvard men’s basketball team is in Palo Alto to play Stanford in the first game of Tommy Amaker’s tenure as head coach. A sophomore guard named Jeremy Lin struggles to zero points while Cardinal center Robin Lopez—his brother Brook recently deemed academically ineligible—torches Harvard inside. The Crimson is blown out, 111-56. It would finish 8-22 on the season, 3-11 in conference play.

February 5, 2011.

Same coach, different roster. Harvard is at home this time, where it was a perfect 14-0 on the season. Along with the Lopez twins, Lin has moved on to the NBA. The Crimson now features an abundance of young talent highlighted by Keith Wright, the Ivy League Player of the Year, and his frontcourt mate Kyle Casey, 2009’s best rookie. Behind the latter’s 24 points, Harvard topples Princeton, 79-67, to clinch a share of the Ivy League title for the first time in the program’s hundred-year history. It finishes the regular season 23-5, 12-2 in the Ancient Eight.

Before the season, I wrote a column entitled “Harvard Basketball Poised for Greatness.” But nobody expected that greatness would come this quickly. Though the start of the Amaker era was not pretty, what has happened in the three-and-a-half years since has been nothing short of remarkable.

In a conference in which recruiting is limited by academic restrictions, Amaker has been able to transform a program with a history of woefulness into one that was top 40 in the country this season. He has quickly turned the Crimson into a place that nationally elite recruits strongly consider attending over the top basketball schools in the country.

Sure, “greatness” here must be taken in context. Harvard is not Duke, or Kentucky, or Kansas. And before the Crimson wins at least two NCAA tournament games, it’s not even Cornell. But considering Harvard’s history and comparing what its basketball was to what it is now, the word “great” certainly seems to be an appropriate adjective.

And the success is only just beginning. Of course, the buzzer-beater loss to the Tigers in the Ivy League playoff was nothing short of heartbreaking. It’s a sickening feeling that 2.8 seconds can change the entire perception of a team’s season. But in that time, Harvard was transformed from the team whose student body had stormed the court in celebration one weekend—the one the national media, even the great Bill Simmons, had taken a strong interest in—into the team that had fallen for a pump-fake off an inbounds play against the same team the next. All that interest, all the success, gone in a whirlwind of ESPN replays and NCAA tournament brackets.

The national media may have forgotten; the NCAA and NIT selection committees may not have taken notice (I won’t get into how the University of Alabama “Zero Quality Wins” Birmingham got offered a spot in the Dance, or how it was subsequentally decided to make the Cinderella story with the highest RPI left out of the tournament into a NIT six-seed and send it to the middle of Oklahoma to play on zero days of rest).

But one group that didn’t forget was the student body, which united around its team this season in a way normally only reserved for the Harvard-Yale football game. Single-handedly, a coach turned a squad of inherited misfits into one of BCS-level talent, and in so doing transformed a group of astrophysicists, economists, and historians into passionate basketball fans. He turned a school of skeptics into literal believers. That is what is truly important about what Amaker has done.

Yes, the Crimson fell short of its March Madness goal this season. The expression “there’s always next year” is a common one in sports, but is more often applied to professional teams than collegiate ones that lose players to graduation and drafts.

But the saying is appropriate here. With the entire team returning and an exceptionally strong recruiting class coming in, Harvard has the potential to be something special. If the players improve as they would be expected to—if Wright perfects his short jumper, if Casey gets stronger, and if Christian Webster and Laurent Rivard become more consistent shooters—it’s easy to foresee the Crimson in the same position as mid-majors like Richmond and VCU at this time next year.

Amaker has transformed the student body. Now he has the means to turn his team into something truly great—not just Harvard great, not just Ivy great, but nationally Top-25 great.

And that is something none of the computer geniuses could have predicted in Palo Alto three-and-a-half years ago.

—Staff writer Scott A. Sherman can be reached at ssherman13@college.harvard.edu.