Ewing’s High School Coach : Mike Jarvis Doing Well at Boston University

Patrick Ewing ended the suspense five years ago this month when he told a crowd of reporters which college would get his exceptional basketball skills.

But what about Mike Jarvis, Ewing’s high school coach? Was he offered an assistant coaching job to lure the prize recruit to a particular college?

“If I had sent a message out that I could have been bought, I would have been bought,” Jarvis said. “If I accepted, I would have lived up to what a lot of people would have liked to believe.”

But he didn’t want to risk things he valued--Ewing’s friendship and a wish to stay in the Boston area--for the insecurity of tying his future to that of a teen-ager.

“What most of the schools would like to have done is hire Mike Jarvis as assistant coach to get Patrick Ewing,” Jarvis said. “Then I would have been Patrick Ewing’s coach and that’s all I would have been.

“When Patrick Ewing left college for the pros I’d probably be out of a job.”

It wasn’t until Ewing left college last season that Jarvis switched jobs, and in his first year as coach at Boston University he has proved he is much more than just Ewing’s coach.

Jarvis has shown he can win at the college level without a spectacular 7-foot center, without a player taller than 6-feet-8 and without two of last season’s top three scorers.

He wasn’t about to write off his first year as a college coach as a rebuilding year. The Terriers, 9-11 after 20 games last season, were 13-7 entering the weekend.

“When you throw out a year, you may have a tendency to relax a little bit,” Jarvis said. “If you say ‘this is going to be an off-year,’ you let it be an off-year.”

One month before Ewing, an All-American at Georgetown, moved to the New York Knicks as the NBA’s first draft choice last June, Jarvis moved to BU after seven seasons as coach of the very successful Cambridge (Mass.) Rindge & Latin High School team.

“I have no regrets,” Jarvis said. “I wouldn’t have taken a job any sooner than I did because I really would have felt that I had not accomplished what I had set out to do at the high school.”

He has installed an exciting style of pressure defense and fastbreaking offense. Attendance is up, and the players like their gregarious coach.

“You can talk to him and you can relate to him off the court and on the court,” senior center Tom Ivey said. “He respects you as a person and an athlete.”

That recognition of each player’s individuality keeps him from holding Ewing up as an example for the Terriers, Jarvis said.

“I wouldn’t want anybody to tell me you should be doing like so and so did,” he said. “The little brother normally resents what the older brother did.”

He said he doesn’t use Ewing, an NBA rookie All-Star, to persuade high-school stars to play for him.

“I don’t want a kid to ever say that ‘I went to BU because Patrick Ewing called me,’ ” Jarvis said, although he admits he likes recruits to think he could help them the way he helped Ewing.

Jarvis, 40, may soft-peddle his involvement with Ewing, but the coach knows his publicity doesn’t come from taking a team into fifth place in the unheralded ECAC North Atlantic Conference.

“If they weren’t writing about Mike Jarvis, Patrick Ewing’s coach, they probably wouldn’t write about Mike Jarvis at all,” he said.

When Ewing arrived at Rindge & Latin, he was a shy Jamaican who was awkward on the basketball court, but had enormous potential. When he left, he had developed as a person and a player.

“I don’t know if Patrick Ewing could have become the complete player he has without me, no more than I know if Mike Jarvis would have made it if he didn’t have Patrick Ewing,” Jarvis said.