BASKETBALL '08 SUPPLEMENT: Picking up the Pieces

For a collegiate coach, crafting a starting lineup is not a fine science, but rather an art.

Call Harvard coach Tommy Amaker the Jackson Pollack of the Ivy coaching realm; for him, it’s all about improvisation.

Last season, this translated into numerous starting fives, with Amaker trying, fruitlessly, to find his masterpiece. It never came, as Harvard posted two separate, crippling seven-game losing streaks en route to an abysmal 8-22 record on the year.

The team, along with its coach, will look to find an answer this year.

“There’s been such a culture of losing surrounding this program for such a long time. People feel that this is Harvard, we shouldn’t be winning,” senior guard Drew Housman says. “If we have one of the best teams, we need to be competing. It’s an attitude we got to have: if we’re solid, we have to go out there and show it.”

Amaker hopes that a change in lineup can spark this change in attitude.

He began this process of roster revamping early. It was evident to anyone watching. From the first day of practice, there was one thing lacking for the Crimson: a sophomore. The entire class of 2010—all recruits of former head coach Frank Sullivan—was gone, either cut or left off the team prior to the beginning of this season.

Amaker declined to comment on these roster changes.

But one needs only to look at the team a year ago to see how far it has come. Of the five players in the starting lineup of the Nov. 28 tilt against New Hampshire last season—sophomores Kyle Fitzgerald, Adam Demuyakor, T.J. Carey, and juniors Jeremy Lin and Dan McGeary—only two remain. Not one of those five starters was a senior last year.

Now, Amaker has a new canvas of his own to work on, as the sophomores have been replaced by an upstart group of standout freshman he recruited.

For Amaker, it was an overhaul he needed.Freshmen Max Kenyi and Oliver McNally, both highly touted out of high school, will clog the guard rotation, giving more options for the coach to play his preferred up-tempo style.

“We like what we have, and we like that the [freshmen] can have a chance to be good someday,” Amaker says. “Maybe that day is tomorrow, and maybe it’s a few months from now.”

These freshmen will push Amaker to make some tough decisions this year, and if last year is a harbinger of things to come, it will be Housman bearing the brunt of it. Over the course of the 2007-08 season, Amaker sat his point guard from the starting lineup seven times. After a string of standout performances his sophomore year, it was a shock not to see him on the floor.

“I’m known to be pretty hard on my guards or point guards, and I’m sure he can attest to that from a year ago,” Amaker says. “But I thought that he was playing as well as anyone and as consistent as anyone so far this year.”

The senior suffered a foot injury last week in practice but will be expected to return to the squad within two weeks. Upon return, Housman must gel with Amaker, a former All-American point guard in his own right, for the team to have any chance of success this year.

“I think our relationship has grown. We’re working hard to make that point guard relationship work because that’s important for the team,” Housman says of his relationship with Amaker. “We’re starting to see eye-to-eye a little more.”

Housman, along with Lin, McGreary, and captain Andrew Pusar, will be competing this preseason for a place alongside these freshman standouts. Kenyi, the three-star recruit and Gatorade Player of the Year from Washington D.C. last season, will look to lead this heralded seven-man freshmen class.

All in all, Amaker will look to play eight or nine consistently over the course of any one game.

But no matter what the starting rotation turns out to be, the team must change its focus. The culture of losing must stop—and it begins this year.

“People are still trying to earn their spot, and we’re trying to grow as a team,” Pusar says. “As far as chemistry, we feel on the same page—we all want to win, no matter the group.”

—Staff writer Walter E. Howell can be reached at wehowell@fas.harvard.edu.