Harvard coach Tommy Amaker pauses to smile. It’s the last presser of the year—scarcely two weeks after Ryan Arcidiacono and Villanova trumped UNC in the season’s climactic title game—and he’s fielding a question he’s been avoiding all year: How did you bring a top-10 recruiting class to Harvard?
The beginning of his answer carries the essential components of a classic Amaker dodge: deflection of personal accountability, praise for his assistants, and a nod to the Harvard brand.
“We’ve been really fortunate in our staff who has done an amazing job,” he says. “[They] put us in a position to communicate with these kids and get them here on campus so they can see it and the growth of our program.... I kind of take myself out of it.”
Midway through, however, he will pause and shake his head—flashing his trademark toothy smile as his way of acknowledging the ridiculousness of it all. A lifelong Dukie who asks for their scores during postgame pressers, it’s hard to believe he isn’t aware that he out-recruited the Tar Heels, who finished two spots below Harvard in ESPN’s recruiting rankings. He surpassed six of the Elite Eight teams as well; the two that beat Harvard, Kansas and Virginia, did so by a combined five slots.
He hasn’t stopped aiming high: the No. 2 overall recruit in the Class of 2017 according to ESPN, Wendell Carter Jr., has publicly said he’s taking his first official visit to Harvard in the fall. In a recent conversation with Scout.com’s Evan Daniels, Carter noted that Harvard will make his final seven and is a definite contender to snag him.
“Tommy Amaker has taken a high-major approach to recruiting and it’s really paid off,” ESPN national recruiting analyst Paul Biancardi said in December. “[This] has never been done before.”
During the year—a disappointing 14-16 slog where Harvard needed wins in four of its final five games to just reach .500 in the Ivy League—Amaker refused to take questions about the incoming class. As the four-star recruits came in—Seth Towns in June, Robert Baker in August, Bryce Aiken in October—he kept the focus on the players on campus.
In that regard, he was alone. From the moment that Siyani Chambers ’16-’17 took a gap year to rehab a torn ACL, the media focus shifted from who the team was to what it would become. The hype of previous seasons quickly dissipated—the five-time defending champion was picked to finish fourth in the Ivy League. Scarcely six months later, ESPN has already christened Harvard the seventh best mid-major in the country for next season, just behind VCU and Wichita State and two spots ahead of Princeton, who brings back every player from a squad that was two baskets away from winning the Ancient Eight.
The hype is largely centered around the freshmen. Aiken, a four-star point guard from New Jersey, is a balanced captain of the offense in the mold of Chambers. Baker and Chris Lewis, the son of NFL linebacker Mo Lewis, will immediately compete with sophomore Chris Egi for the starting spot alongside All-Ivy junior center Zena Edosomwan. Also in the mix is Henry Welsh, one of three players in the class 6’8” or taller and the brother of UCLA sophomore Thomas Welsh, who averaged 11.2 points and 8.5 rebounds in his second year on campus.
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Arguably the best of the bunch comes in with no clear competition for his position. Towns, a silky smooth scorer from Columbus, broke his high school’s points record earlier this semester—no small feat when Jared Sullinger and Trey Burke are the competition. He averaged 32 points and 12 rebounds while showing an ability to play both inside and out—allowing him to toggle between the three and the four in a forward rotation that is short on shooting.
Towns, like many of the freshmen, is a quintessential Amaker recruit, boasting high-level basketball talent alongside standout academics. He carries a GPA north of 4.0 and competes on his school’s math team, but may not even be the most academically oriented of the class; Lewis strongly considered going to MIT to pursue engineering and indicated that the ability of Harvard students to take MIT classes factored into his decision.
“I thought [Harvard] would be the best balance between athletics and academics,” Lewis told future150.com after he signed.
Lewis’s quote reflects the thrust of Amaker’s pitch to recruits. Like men’s hockey coach Ted Donato, he tells recruits that Harvard is a “40-year decision,” not just a four-year one. Current players take the motto to heart.
“Four years from now, when no one cares who Zena Edosomwan is, I know a lot of opportunities will be there for me to be successful on and off the court,” Edosomwan, the first top-100 recruit to come to Harvard, told Sports Illustrated when he committed. “If I become successful, people will remember that I took that chance, that I had a higher purpose than basketball.”
“Maybe I’ll be a trendsetter,” he presciently closed.
The road to Towns, Aiken, Baker, etc. began long before Edosomwan, however. Amaker’s first big recruit was Oliver McNally ’12, a feisty point guard from Northern California who had over 20 other offers. McNally and classmate Keith Wright ’12 were the first in a series of dominos to fall. In the coming years, Harvard would begin to get into play for the big fish—Brandon Knight put Harvard on his final list, while Jabari Parker and Victor Oladipo were both connected with the Crimson in the twilight days of their recruiting processes.
Stories of the staff’s persistence are legendary—McNally got calls nearly every single day, while Amaker began showing up at Chambers’ games when the point guard was in eighth grade.
“[Amaker] wanted us to go out and identify the best possible students out there who could play basketball at the highest level,” VCU head coach Will Wade, a former Amaker assistant and lead recruiter, told the Crimson in 2014. “He was always pushing us to find even better—identify more kids.”
On the road, Amaker’s pitch is multifaceted. He leveraged the school’s academic brand—one he often refers to at the best in the world—in trying to build a basketball one. “Defense and Harvard,” he jokingly calls it.
Yet, he finds ways to connect with recruits: in a midweek interview last year, players on the team noted the importance of Amaker’s personal faith in forming connections. The coach himself doesn’t discuss that, but mentions that he tailors his approach to communicate to a vastly different generation.
“Trying to communicate with a kid on my phone is just... It just doesn’t happen,” Amaker said. “Obviously it’s not a world I was born into like these kids are. This generation, that’s all they know so it forces old heads like me to kind of work with that and try to understand it.”
“I thought I was cool at one point,” he laughs. “But not anymore I guess.”
Given his presence on the recruiting trail, many might disagree.
Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com.
