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Higher Education: How basketball coach Tommy Amaker has transformed Harvard

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Amaker was not alone. “I made it my point to recruit African-American kids,” says Blakeney, Amaker’s former assistant, who is black, “that could have success and do well on that campus as student-athletes.” It also, Blakeney suggests, reflects a shift in Harvard’s ethos, which accompanied a recent increase in financial aid. “Harvard’s done it with the Kennedy’s, they’ve done it with the Roosevelt’s,” Blakeney says, summarizing his recruiting pitch. “What my take was on campus is that they want to do it a little different now.”

The question was whether recruits would respond to the message and whether they would see Harvard as a place where they could be comfortable. As a result, Amaker has brought recruits to on-campus get-togethers of the Harvard Black Alumni Society. “Coach Amaker wanted to give the students he was recruiting an opportunity to see seven or eight hundred black Harvard alums and also have their parents see that group,” says Walter Morris, a past president of the Harvard Alumni Association who is active in the Black Alumni Society.

The move is not without precedent. Northeastern University Athletic Director Peter Roby, who was Harvard’s second black head basketball coach from 1985-91, recalls that he and several of the black assistant football coaches had what they called the “black alert”: when a black recruit for either sport came on campus, they made a point to meet him.

The racial and socioeconomic diversity of the team has made an impression on many at Harvard, including several of the faculty members whom Amaker approached about taking pictures with his players in the media guide. “The truth today is that dumb, rich kids are much more likely to complete college than even the most able poor kids,” says Larry Summers, who significantly expanded financial aid as Harvard’s president, adding that, “successful recruiting of first-rate basketball players has a role in contributing to promoting diversity.”

Tim McCarthy, who played JV ball for Harvard in the early 1990s and teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School, makes the point even more forcefully. “The fact that this winning team can … bring together different kinds of kids to play on the same team together and have that be the public face of a new Harvard, that’s great,” he says. “That’s … sports at its best.”

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On March 5, 2011, Harvard’s 6’7 forward Kyle Casey, one of Amaker’s prize recruits, held the ball just outside the three-point line, with the Crimson up 44-40 at home against Princeton. Playing before a sold-out crowd, a win would guarantee Harvard a share of the Ivy League title, the first in program history. Casey got his defender in the air with a shot fake, drove the baseline, and threw down a one-handed dunk while drawing a foul that threw Lavietes Pavilion into a frenzy rarely, if ever, seen previously in program history.

The fans that night included shirtless football players, breakfast club members and basketball alumni, and even celebrities like ESPN’s Bill Simmons. The students stormed the court after Harvard won, 79-67.

One week later, Harvard’s fortunes reversed when Princeton defeated the Crimson at Yale in a one-game playoff on a buzzer beater, denying the Crimson its first NCAA tournament bid since 1946.

Harvard lost, but in disappointment had, somewhat improbably, come together.

Trey Grayson, a Harvard alum who had recently been named the director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, listened to the game on his rental car’s XM radio while driving to a political event in eastern Kentucky. Upon returning to Cambridge, he reached out to friends in the athletic department and became the team’s faculty fellow.

McLaughlin, the former coach who had helped bring Amaker to Cambridge, watched the game on his computer. “When it looked like Harvard was going to win the game, I was so upset at myself for not going,” McLaughlin recalls. “And then when the fluke shot was made, I was so happy I didn’t go because I wouldn’t have been able to take it emotionally.”

And in the stands that day were generations of Harvard players, many of whom gathered after the game at Mory’s, a traditional Yale watering hole. In an atmosphere that was strangely communal and almost festive, attendees lamented the loss, but anticipated the bright future for the squad, which had no graduating seniors.

They sensed next year would be special.

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In the 2011-12 season, not long after his team captured the inaugural Battle4Atlantis championship in November, Amaker received a voicemail from a man claiming to be Bill Cosby. Suspicious that a friend was pranking him, Amaker was pleasantly surprised to find himself speaking to the television celebrity. Cosby’s message proved powerful. According to Amaker, Cosby said, “‘I just want you to know [my wife] Camille and I were watching your team play, and we were just so amazed and impressed that you have these black boys that can get into Harvard and can jump.”

The call came in a season when Harvard cracked the Associated Press and Coaches’ Top 25 for the first time in program history and earned its first berth to the NCAA Tournament since 1946. That summer, the team toured Italy where they swept several professional teams. Entering the 2012-13 season, Harvard appeared poised for a repeat trip to the tournament.

Then, in September 2012, Sports Illustrated reported that senior co-captains Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry were withdrawing from school after being implicated in a cheating scandal that affected more than 100 students. Curry and Casey, however, were the only two students whose names were leaked to the press.

“I remember cringing when I saw those articles,” says McCarthy, the Kennedy School faculty member, “[and] thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is only going to reinforce and confirm the worst kinds of prejudices and perceptions that are untrue.’”

The news contributed to a resurgence of criticism. Nicolaus Mills, a member of the Harvard Class of 1960 and American studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College, wrote a stinging op-ed for CNN chastising the university for allowing athletes to take a year off from school to preserve their athletic eligibility. Mills harped on Harvard’s basketball team, “At Harvard the most noteworthy early withdrawals from the school are those of the senior co-captains on the basketball team, which in recent years has been faced with troubling questions about its players and coach.”

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