Zachary Levine: The Missing Link

Try this out sometime.

Go up to some 11th grade basketball players, guys who have been following the game since elementary school. Ask them a few questions and see if you get these answers.

Who's Tommy Amaker?

Played at Duke then coached at Seton Hall and Michigan.

Who's Mike Jarvis?

Coached Ron Artest to the Elite Eight at St. John's.

Who's Glen Miller?

I have no idea. The Republicans cut our school's music funding.

The subjects of the first two questions, as has been well publicized, are candidates for the Harvard men's basketball coaching job. Of all the searches going on in the heart of post-Final Four "Musical Chairs Week," Harvard's may be wrapped in the strangest of circumstances.

In Harvard, you have a school with the nation's best name-recognition and a basketball program bordering on the worst. Add in the recent coverage of the fact that the university has no black coaches in its athletic department, and you have a search that could go very differently from Penn's last year.

And it should.

Frank Sullivan's firing after 16 years of meandering through the wilderness of mediocrity represented a key step for the program. Not because Sullivan deserved to be fired, but it appears to be going hand-in-hand with an institutional philosophy change.

Now, bringing in one of the big-name coaches like Amaker, Jarvis or disgraced Ohio State coach Jim O'Brien is the next step.

It's a step that the Quakers program never needed to take.

"Harvard is Harvard," Penn Associate Athletic Director Mary DiStanislao said. "It has its own name recognition different from Penn, which has a distinct character as a basketball school."

"The two programs are very different places," added Jake Wilson, Ivy League basketball guru, who runs the Web site basketball-u.com. "Penn was very much established; they were looking for someone to come in and do their thing for a while. Harvard's really looking for someone to rebuild it."

Of the qualities that it takes to be a good coach, it starts with recruiting. And in recruiting, it starts with the name.

Take it from somebody who's experienced with being recruited.

"If you hear some no-name or if you hear Mike Jarvis who's taken three teams to the Tournament, you're going to take Jarvis' call," said Vince Curran, color commentator for Penn broadcasts, who played for the Red and Blue from 1988-92.

But rebuilding a program that has as many Ivy League titles as the West Philadelphia Boy Scouts takes more than just a name.

It takes a commitment.

A commitment to basketball.

It's something that has never been questioned in the regime of Steve Bilsky, one of the best hoopsters Penn has ever seen.

But under Harvard's Bob Scalise, a former lacrosse and soccer coach, many feel that the commitment to the basketball program hasn't been up to an acceptable level to build a winning program.

"Frank did not get the support he needed from them," Wilson said. "For Harvard to be involved with names of that caliber, it tells you that they're probably trying to make more of a commitment."

Bring in Mike Jarvis and subject him to the same admissions standards and budget issues that crippled Sullivan, and what do you have?

You still have a mediocre program. Just a mediocre program coached by somebody with longer sideburns and a funnier Boston accent.

But bring Harvard up to match its peers on the institutional level, and a big name coach will be able to compensate for the history in Penn and Princeton's corners.

And some day, when young basketball players get calls from Harvard and Penn, it may be the other one that they're taking more seriously.

Zachary Levine is a senior mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.

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