In a New Era at Harvard, New Questions of Standards
By
PETE THAMEL
BOSTON —
Harvard has never won an
Ivy League title in men’s basketball and has not reached the
N.C.A.A. tournament since 1946. This season, the team won only 8 of its first 28 games. Like all the universities in the Ivy League, Harvard does not award athletic scholarships.
Yet the group of six recruits expected to join the team next season is rated among the nation’s 25 best. This is partly because Harvard Coach
Tommy Amaker, who starred at
Duke and coached in the Big East and Big Ten conferences, has set his sights on top-flight recruits. It is also because Harvard is willing to consider players with a lower academic standing than previous staff members said they were allowed to. Harvard has also adopted aggressive recruiting tactics that skirt or, in some cases, may even violate National Collegiate Athletic Association rules.
Harvard’s efforts in basketball underscore the increasingly important role that success in high-profile sports plays at even the most elite universities. In the race to become competitive in basketball, Harvard’s new approach could tarnish the university’s sterling reputation.
Two athletes who said they had received letters from Harvard’s admissions office saying they would most likely be accepted have described tactics that may violate N.C.A.A. rules, including visits from a man who worked out with them shortly before he was hired by Harvard to be an assistant coach.
An N.C.A.A. spokesman, Erik Christianson, said the organization’s rules state, “Should a coach recruit on behalf of a school but not be employed there, he or she is then considered a booster and that recruiting activity is not allowed.”
In another case, Amaker approached the parents of an athlete in a grocery store and urged that their son visit Harvard, even though N.C.A.A. rules limit contact with potential players to happenstance at certain times of the year. That athlete ended up not considering Harvard.
Yale Coach James Jones said he had seen an academic change at Harvard. “It’s eye-opening because there seems to have been a drastic shift in restrictions and regulations with the Harvard admissions office,” he said. “We don’t know how all this is going to come out, but we could not get involved with many of the kids that they are bringing in.”
Harvard’s athletic director, Bob Scalise, acknowledged that Amaker’s staff had recruited some players with lower academic profiles than the previous staff had, but he stressed that no athletes had yet been admitted. “It’s also a willingness to basically say, ‘O.K., maybe we need to accept a few more kids and maybe we need to go after a few more kids in the initial years when Tommy is trying to change the culture of the program,’ ” Scalise said last week. “It’s a willingness to say that we really do want to compete for the Ivy championship.”
To be sure, programs at larger universities would be delighted to have players with the academic standing of Amaker’s new recruits. Scalise said that other Ivy League programs also considered Harvard’s recruits. Harvard, he said, has chosen to remake its basketball program into a perennial contender for the Ivy title and the automatic berth in the N.C.A.A. tournament that goes with it. Scalise said he was made aware of “three or four” complaints of recruiting incidents from rivals and sat down with Amaker last November for “a teaching moment.” He said he told Amaker that he and his staff needed to act in ways “beyond reproach.”
But Scalise said he was not aware until told by The New York Times that Amaker’s top assistant, Kenny Blakeney, had traveled a long distance to play pickup basketball with a recruit during periods when the N.C.A.A. does not allow contact with prospective players. Blakeney said he had not been officially hired by Harvard when he visited that recruit and another prospective player.
Even if Harvard did not break any N.C.A.A. rules, many in the coaching community said Amaker’s staff had behaved unethically. On Friday, Alan J. Stone, a spokesman for the university, said: “We can say that any statement about someone being admitted to Harvard who is not qualified would be absolutely inaccurate, as is any suggestion that our standards have been lowered for basketball. Harvard’s admission criteria are — and remain — very high. They have not changed at all.”
To understand Harvard’s apparent change in philosophy, it is necessary to appreciate the complicated tap dance of Ivy League recruiting. Nearly every prospective Ivy player must meet a minimum on the Academic Index, a measuring tool that uses grade-point average, class rank and standardized test scores. For example, a student with a 3.1 grade-point average and just over 1,560 out of a possible 2,400 on the SAT would register roughly a 171 on the Academic Index, the minimum score allowed by the Ivy League for athletes.
Two former Harvard assistant coaches, Bill Holden and Lamar Reddicks, said they adhered to even tougher standards under Coach Frank Sullivan. Last season’s team, they said, had an average of 206, the highest in the league by a significant margin. Sullivan, who in his 16 seasons won and lost more games than any other Harvard basketball coach, was fired after the season. Amaker did not rehire Holden and Reddicks. Holden and Reddicks said that Harvard’s team index had to be 202. They said that essentially meant they could not recruit a player whose index was lower than 195, and they characterized Harvard’s standards as tougher than those of other Ivy programs.
Scalise said he expected Harvard to still have the highest index average among the Ivy members. It is not certain that all six of Amaker’s recruits will land on campus, and other recruits with better credentials could raise the index average.
A Sign of Change
The 6-foot-10 center Frank Ben-Eze from Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, Va., embodies the change in Harvard’s basketball recruiting. He orally committed to Harvard over traditional powers like Marquette, West Virginia, Virginia and Penn. Although he and the rest of the recruited athletes have yet to be admitted to Harvard, Ben-Eze is considered Amaker’s biggest coup, one Amaker proudly mentions to other potential players. Ben-Eze, a native of Nigeria, has yet to receive what is called a likely letter from the admissions office, a written assurance that a player will be accepted, because he has not attained the 171 index minimum.
Like all of Harvard’s applicants, none of Amaker’s recruits have been admitted yet.
But Max Kenyi, a 6-3 shooting guard from Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., and Keith Wright, a 6-7 forward at Norfolk Collegiate in Virginia, said that they had each received a likely letter. They were well below index levels that the previous staff members said they had adhered to. “There are guys that we couldn’t touch that other schools in our league could recruit,” said Reddicks, who is now an assistant at
Boston University. “It makes a huge difference.” Scalise said the comments of Reddicks and Holden reflected the bitterness of not having their contracts renewed. He added that the previous coaching staff could not lure such a talented class because it did not have the connections, charisma and work ethic of Amaker and his assistants. “Sounds like there’s a lot of jealousy and also sounds like people are trying to protect the status quo for their programs,” Scalise said. Sullivan, who signed a confidentiality agreement when he was fired by Harvard, declined to comment.
Emphasis on Recruiting
Amaker, 42, was fired by Michigan last spring after failing to produce a single N.C.A.A. tournament appearance in his six seasons there. But in his previous job, as coach at
Seton Hall, he and his staff had great success in recruiting. Amaker beat out other well-established coaches for the Harvard job.
Among them were Pete Gillen, a former coach at Xavier, Providence and Virginia, and
Mike Jarvis, whose St. John’s program ended up on N.C.A.A. probation after he was fired. Harvard also interviewed Mike Gillian, coach at Longwood University in Virginia, and John O’Connor, an assistant coach at
Georgia Tech, in person. Those four coaches said in telephone interviews that they had been assured they would not be at a disadvantage among their Ivy League peers in recruiting. “The bottom line was that they wanted to win,” O’Connor said of Harvard. “They also thought in that room that times had changed and the big boys had come back to the pack. Now was the time to make the move.”
The recruiting analyst Dave Telep of
At their request, this network is being blocked from this site. called Amaker’s potential class the best in Harvard history and, perhaps, in Ivy League history. Kenyi is a solid midmajor player who picked Harvard over other Ivy League members as well as Holy Cross, Virginia Commonwealth and George Mason. Wright received interest from Illinois, Davidson and other Ivy League members before committing to Harvard. Wright said that Blakeney had visited him when in-person contact between coaches and recruits was not allowed. Kenyi said Blakeney, a former Duke player, played basketball with him “a couple of times” at his high school last June or July, which is against N.C.A.A. contact rules. Harvard announced Blakeney’s hiring on July 2, 2007.
Kenyi said that at first he did not realize who Blakeney was. But the man soon turned into his lead Harvard recruiter.
Two weeks ago, Blakeney said his trips to Gonzaga were to visit the basketball coach, Steve Turner, whom he has known for 20 years, and to stay in shape by playing. The visits made an impression on Kenyi. “He was someone I could relate to,” Kenyi said, “someone I could talk to about anything.” Meanwhile, coaches from other teams recruiting Wright and Kenyi were allowed to call only once a month. “He actually got to play with us, because he wasn’t actually on Harvard’s staff,” Wright said, adding that Blakeney had gone to Norfolk for one of his summer basketball team’s practices. “He didn’t sign anything yet, so he got to play with us, and we talked and exchanged numbers.”
The practice of recruiting in person before being officially hired is becoming more prevalent among the more high-profile basketball programs. “Assuming the coach knows exactly what he’s doing, it’s unethical,” said Jim Haney, the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. Blakeney denied he was recruiting Kenyi and Wright then. “I was unemployed,” he said, repeating: “I was unemployed. I don’t know if it’s a gray area or anything like that. I hadn’t signed a contract. I didn’t have any type of agreement with anybody. How could I recruit them to Harvard if I’m not employed?”
Craig Robinson, the coach at Brown, said “wow” when told of Blakeney’s pickup games with high school athletes. He laughed before saying, “I would say that would give them an advantage.”
Robinson added that it was understandable if Blakeney happened to run across a player in his native Washington but that traveling to Norfolk, about 190 miles away, was a different story.
“If he travels across a state line to play with a kid he’s going to be recruiting, that smacks a little bit of breaking the rules,” Robinson said. He added: “It would not be the way that we would conduct business. In the long run, that hurts you. There’s nothing wrong with pushing the envelope, but if your attempt is to get around the rules, there’s an issue.”
Amaker, who declined to respond to specific questions in person, released a statement Friday through a university spokesman. “Harvard adheres to austere standards in every area of the university and I am honored to labor within that framework,” the statement said. “Individuals with knowledge of our staff understand the high principles under which we operate. We work within the spirit of Harvard and the Ivy League.”
Another issue arose with the recruiting of Zack Rosen, a 6-1 point guard bound for Penn and sought by universities like Rutgers and
Virginia Tech. Amaker saw Rosen’s father, Les, in a grocery store in Trenton during the Eastern Invitational tournament last summer. At the time, coaches were restricted only to watching recruits and saying hello to them or their parents if they bumped into each other. Les Rosen remembered Amaker saying, “We really have to get Zack up to Harvard.” Les Rosen said he thought to himself: Who goes to ShopRite in the middle of a basketball tournament? “It was suspicious,” he said, “but as much as it seemed obvious, he wouldn’t be found guilty in court.” Harvard looked into the Rosen situation and determined that no violations occurred. Scalise said he and his athletic staff would look into Blakeney’s actions during the recruiting of Kenyi and Wright.
“Now that I’m aware of it, we’ll talk and try and find out what went on,” he said. “I would like our programs to be totally above the board.”
Adam Himmelsbach contributed reporting from Norfolk, Va., and Washington.
