Coach of the Year: Tommy Amaker

Things had been trending up for Harvard men’s basketball coach Tommy Amaker. In 2011, he led the Crimson to its first-ever Ivy championship. The next year, Amaker guided Harvard to its first NCAA tournament appearance in 66 years. With the graduation of only two starters heading into the 2012-13 season, there was no reason to expect anything but another step forward in program history.

But by the time the season tipped off in the fall, Amaker had been tasked with perhaps the most difficult coaching challenge of his career.

With the unexpected departures from school of former co-captains Brandyn Curry and Kyle Casey, both starters on the title-winning 2011-12 squad, Amaker needed to fill a couple of gaping holes in his roster: the points and interior presence of Casey, the team’s leading scorer, and the ball-handling and perimeter defense of Curry, the only returning point guard that averaged more than two minutes per game.

“We were dealt a hand that was incredibly unexpected and, from the outside looking in, looked like it could be completely devastating,” Amaker said.

Given the extenuating circumstances, the triumph that the season would ultimately become, highlighted by the Crimson’s second-round NCAA tournament upset of three-seed New Mexico, was due in large part to the rise of the team’s young talent and the mid-season adjustments Amaker made.

“The phrase we used at the beginning of the year and carried through the rest of the year was ‘we may not have what we had, but we have enough,’” Amaker said. “That’s how we approached it—what an opportunity.”

For most coaches, one season begins the day that the previous one ends. For Amaker, the opening day of the 2012-2013 campaign was even earlier—four years earlier.

Amaker began planning for the 2012-2013 season in 2008, when he first attended now-freshman point guard Siyani Chambers’ middle school basketball contests. The time, travel, and commitment that that early recruitment took paid off in baskets, assists, and wins, as Chambers led the squad to the conference title in his rookie year.

“A lot of relationships can develop through the recruitment process,” Amaker said. “You get connected to certain guys. I’m probably more connected to our guards, point guard in particular.”

The connection between the former and current point guards led to a degree of confidence in Chambers that was key in several late-game situations throughout the season.

In addition to incorporating new faces into the lineup, Amaker had to juggle his existing talent to maximize his team’s potential.

One, if not the largest, of Amaker’s midseason coaching changes was the insertion of sophomore Kenyatta Smith into the starting lineup, a position that he never relinquished after starting against Penn. Smith provided a strong defensive presence down low, a role that was lacking in several of the previous games. In the Feb. 15 contest against Penn and the subsequent night’s competition with Princeton, Smith contributed a combined 34 points, 16 rebounds, and 16 blocks to his team’s box score.

The weekend that this change took place was perhaps the most crucial of the season for the Crimson. With the squad’s perennial struggles against the Killer P’s and its recent loss to a struggling Columbia team, Harvard needed two wins to keep close to Princeton for first place in the conference.

“He changed our team at a critical moment,” Amaker said. “Teams evolve and change throughout the course of seasons—sometimes you start one way and have to make a detour…. There is no greater feeling as a coach [and] as a teacher than to see [a player’s growth] happening before your eyes.”

Thanks in large part to the newfound paint presence that Smith provided, the Crimson was able to sweep the weekend and take another big step toward turning what looked to be a rebuilding year into just another step forward on the program’s recent historic march.

“When you tell great stories, or read great books, or see great movies that have special moments, most of the time, if not all the time, they have to come through something that was perceived to be devastating or insurmountable,” Amaker said.

—Staff writer Andrew R. Mooney can be reached at mooney@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @mooneyar.

—Staff writer Juliet Spies-Gans can be reached at jspiesgans@college.harvard.edu.