CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Over the past four months, the Harvard men’s basketball team has been ranked among the top 25 teams in the country for the first time ever. It was hailed as the springboard for the career of new NBA sensation Jeremy Lin. And on Tuesday night, for the first time since 1946, Harvard qualified for the NCAA tournament by winning the Ivy League championship.
It is perhaps no longer surprising that Ivy League institutions can produce good athletes and teams capable of winning outside their conference. Yet Harvard has been around for 376 years and nothing like this has happened before.
“Everyone is so excited about it; In the dining halls, everyone is talking about it,” said Danielle Rabinowitz, a Harvard sophomore from Brookline, Massachusetts. “So even for someone like me, who doesn’t go to basketball games myself, I’m pretty in tune with the success of the basketball team.
“People still have the stereotypical impression that our conversations are usually about philosophy or obscure topics that the common man cannot relate to. I think just adding that sports element to the mix grounds us in a more human way, which is really great.
Tyler Neill, a graduate student in South Asian studies, was walking around Harvard Yard Wednesday morning reading a copy of Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” in its original German version. Neill had little knowledge of the university’s latest basketball accomplishments.
“I don’t watch any sports,” Neill said. “It’s not on my radar. In fact, when I talked to my dad about it, he brought it up. He’s excited.
The mix of emotions — and lack of emotions — contrasted with the reaction on many campuses this week as NCAA berths were decided and celebrated.
For example, no banners or toilet paper got stuck in tree branches Wednesday during a basketball rally the night before. The chest and face of the John Harvard statue had not been painted crimson. No one had written “NCAA” on the pillars of the library’s facade, nor had anyone written “ESPN, Here We Come” on the neighboring quadrangle.
“We’re not Duke and we don’t want to be,” said Peter Sampson, an alumnus from Los Angeles who was visiting campus to attend a research seminar. “We’re proud of the basketball team, and if they’re going to play, they might as well be good. But we are also proud of everyone. Tomorrow may be the time to notice a revolutionary new book written by a professor or a scientific discovery. A basketball game is fleeting.
Maybe so, but on Wednesday, the college bookstore and clothing store was preparing to take an unprecedented step: produce commemorative T-shirts recognizing the Ivy League basketball team’s title. This has not been the case for Lin, despite customer demand.
Harvard will find out Sunday which team it faces in the tournament, but whoever its opponent is, it will likely be an underdog.
Harvard tied for the Ivy regular season championship last season, but lost a playoff game that decided the league’s automatic berth in the NCAA. The Crimson won the 2012 title on Tuesday when Penn lost to Princeton, falling one game short of Harvard’s 12-2 Ivy record.
Most Harvard players watched the Penn-Princeton game in their dorm rooms, although senior co-captain Oliver McNally said he missed most of the game when he fell asleep after staying awake all Monday night to write a paper for his American foreign policy class.
Energized by his team’s Ivy championship, McNally decided to walk across campus.
“People I didn’t know were stopping to congratulate me,” McNally said. “My teachers were emailing me asking about the NCAA Tournament. I remember thinking: This didn’t happen four years ago, when no one on campus knew us. We had no impact then.
The Harvard team before the arrival of McNally and some of his senior teammates was 8-22. This year’s team was 26-4. Coach Tommy Amaker, now in his fifth year at Harvard, remembers that when he accepted the job, he would sometimes encounter someone who, upon hearing his trade, would say, “I didn’t know Harvard had a team of basketball. »
Asked before Wednesday’s team practice if anyone had said that to him recently, he smiled: “I haven’t had that lately, no.”
Part of Amaker’s success has been convincing top high school players from all parts of the country that Harvard does indeed play college basketball at the highest level.
McNally, for example, initially refused to attend Harvard as a high school student. Eventually, after narrowing his recruiting choices to colleges near his California home, he flew east to Massachusetts, but only because his parents insisted.
“I ended up committing to Harvard during my visit,” he said. “It’s an awesome place, and Coach Amaker made the point that it would be fun to build something new at Harvard. It’s great to see so many people coming together and getting involved.
His co-captain, Keith Wright, agreed, to a point.
“It’s not like I walk into a classroom and everyone starts clapping,” Wright said. “It’s still Harvard. People cheer for A’s on a test, or want to.
For Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, the basketball team’s significant accomplishments this winter include bringing a diverse population to campus.
“The team has been a true community-building force,” Faust said. “It’s a tribute to the notion of the student-athlete, and it’s happening at the same time as the phenom Jeremy Lin, who was on this team just two years ago and was an all-student here.”
Faust has attended several Harvard games this season, sitting behind one of the baskets — often a serious fan’s choice — in the small gymnasium of the old-fashioned clubhouse where Harvard plays its home games. She said her husband was a die-hard basketball fan and the game had deep roots in his family.
But now, the Harvard basketball team will take to one of the biggest stages on the annual American sports calendar. People across the country will learn that Harvard has a basketball team and that it has won 26 games, some against ranked teams.
Was Faust worried that people would start thinking of Harvard as a sports school?
Laughing, she said: “I think we’re pretty safe about that for a while.”
