COLLEGE BASKETBALL 1991-92 : Winning, by the Books : Special Kind of Player Succeeds in Ivy League

His peers have suggested that Pete Carril might be the best coach in college basketball.

But coaching at Princeton has kept him humble.

Recalling a phone conversation with a parent of a potential recruit last season, Carril said he was told that he was a terrific coach and that the caller would really love for his son to play for the Tigers.

“But you’re not worth $20,000,” the caller said.

Such is life for basketball coaches in the Ivy League, where admissions standards and tuition costs are stratospheric, but athletic scholarships are not offered.

Since all scholarships are based on financial need, potential recruits to the Ancient Eight--Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale--must either be poor enough to qualify for financial aid or rich enough not to have to worry about it while still meeting tough academic requirements.

That doesn’t leave an overly abundant talent pool.

Yale Coach Dick Kuchen agrees.

“We can’t just recruit the corridor between New Haven (Conn.) and Washington, D.C.,” he said. “Because you could probably meet all the guys in a phone booth who would meet the requirements of the university and still be able to play basketball.”

Still, Ivy League coaches have turned up a few players who have made an impact:

--Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), led Princeton to the Final Four in 1965, then helped the New York Knicks win NBA championships in 1970 and ’73.

--Columbia’s Jim McMillian averaged 18.8 points for the Lakers when they won a record 33 consecutive games and the NBA title in 1971-72.

--Princeton’s Geoff Petrie averaged 21.8 points in six seasons with the Portland Trail Blazers in the 1970s.

--And Dartmouth’s Rudy LaRusso played for 10 NBA seasons during the 1960s, eight with the Lakers.

But for the most part, Carril and his associates make do with players who will never play the sport professionally. The only Ivy Leaguer currently active in the NBA is Chris Dudley of the New Jersey Nets, a 6-foot-11 reserve center from Yale.

Even when they do find players who fit the Ivy League profile, coaches must convince the players’ parents that they should pay upward of $25,000 a year for education, rather than let him accept an athletic scholarship to, say, Stanford or Vanderbilt or Northwestern.

But the Ivy League’s elite remain surprisingly competitive.

“I was surprised myself,” said Kuchen, in his sixth season at Yale after seven at California. “Interestingly enough, I’ve kind of felt that one of the best-kept secrets in college basketball is the quality of some of the upper-echelon teams in this league.”

Those who were at the Providence Civic Center three seasons ago, or at least saw it on ESPN, will probably never forget the night Princeton, a 16th-seeded team, took top-seeded Georgetown to the wire before losing in the first round of the NCAA tournament, 50-49.

It took two blocked shots by Alonzo Mourning in the last eight seconds to beat the Tigers.

Using the same zone defense and methodical offensive style two seasons ago--the patient Tigers pass and cut, pass and cut, accepting almost nothing but layups and wide-open three-point shots--Princeton extended Arkansas before losing a first-round game to the Final Four-bound Razorbacks, 68-64.

Last season, Carril’s Tigers were 24-3, ranked 18th in the nation at the end of the regular season and again became a heartbreak loser in the NCAA tournament, this time to Villanova, 50-48.

Only two Ivy League teams have ever reached the Final Four--neither Princeton in 1965 nor Penn in 1979 made the championship game--but it wasn’t until 1986, when Syracuse beat Brown, 101-52, that an Ivy representative was truly embarrassed in the first round of the tournament.

In 1975, Carril coached Princeton to the only National Invitation Tournament championship won by an Ivy League school.

And after North Carolina beat Pennsylvania, 113-82, in 1987 and Arizona overwhelmed Cornell, 90-50, in 1988, Carril showed in the last three seasons that the Ivy champion could still be competitive in the NCAA tournament.

“He has really raised the awareness of Ivy League basketball,” former Harvard center Joe Carrabino said. “He’s really brought respect.”

Yet it would take a minor miracle for an Ivy League team to win an NCAA basketball championship now, Carril said.

“I think that’s unrealistic,” he said. “And many times I say to myself, ‘You know, you’re really a coward for not wanting to go somewhere where you could do that.’ And the next day, I’ll think that I’m brave--too brave--for wanting to stay here (despite the long odds).”

Something has kept him at Princeton for 24 seasons.

Maybe it’s the respect he gets on campus.

Several years ago, the Daily Princetonian conducted a survey to find out who students believed had best fulfilled the objectives of his position at Princeton, whether it be the president of the university, the Nobel laureates among the faculty or anybody else.

The winner was Carril.

Maybe Carril wouldn’t mesh with higher-profile players.

Two summers ago, after coaching in the U.S. Olympic Festival, Carril announced that he had had enough of monitoring all-star teams.

“No offense to the guys on my team, but this makes me appreciate my players (at Princeton),” Carril said after his East squad had won the bronze medal. “These guys worry too much about how many minutes they’re going to play, who’s going to take the shot, who’s going to do this.

“I told them yesterday, ‘You guys sleep together, you stay in the same dorm, you eat together and yet when guys are wide open, you pass them up. It’s unreal that you even consider yourself friendly when you’re so selfish.’ ”

Although he has had numerous offers, Carril said he has always leaned toward staying at Princeton, where his annual salary is thought to be considerably under six figures, but is augmented by a summer camp and a modest shoe contract.

And, ultimately, he has remained.

“The world out there is a little risky for a guy like myself,” said Carril, who considers himself a teacher first and foremost and relishes the opportunity to work with students who are among the country’s best and brightest, if not the most athletically skilled.

“I wouldn’t want to get involved in having someone make sure my guys go to class. That would bother me if I had to appoint a guy to make sure all the kids went to class.”

Getting the players into their classrooms isn’t usually a problem in the Ivy League, where athletes are students first, where the scandals that periodically rock college basketball in general seem a million miles away, where players ponder matters more important than minutes played.

A sampler of life in the Ivy League:

--At Brown, senior center Mike Gates skipped three games last season so that he could return home to Warren, Mich., to attend a series of interviews for a Rhodes scholarship.

--At Dartmouth several seasons ago, guard Bryan Randall showed up at practice one day stiff and sore, explaining to his coaches that he had spent the night on the university president’s desk as part of an anti-apartheid protest.

--At Cornell, practice was canceled one day this week so that players could prepare for tests being given later that night.

--At Yale, players did not blindly wear U.S. flag decals on their uniforms during the Persian Gulf War last season, as almost every team in college basketball did. When they chose not to wear them at all, it wasn’t because they didn’t support the U.S. troops in the Gulf, but because they did not support the government’s decision to send them there to fight.

--At Penn, forward Mike Milobsky is eligible to apply for another season of eligibility because of a foot injury will sideline him this season, but having been accepted to medical school, he has decided not to bother.

--At Columbia, Coach Jack Rohan arranged for his practices to start at 7:30 a.m. so they wouldn’t conflict with class schedules.

--At every Ivy League school, players routinely arrive late for practice at least one day a week because of conflicts with classes or labs.

And where else but in the Ivy League would a player describe his work under the backboards as “a game of subtle felony,” as Carrabino once did?

In the Ivy League, several rules have been enacted to make sure the athletes’ priorities are kept in proper order:

--With few exceptions, league games are played on Friday and Saturday nights, so that players will miss a minimum of class time, and overnight travel is not permitted for many trips, almost all of which are made by bus.

For instance, when Princeton plays at Yale, it must make the three-hour bus trip from Princeton, N.J., to New Haven, Conn., on the day of the game.

UCLA’s basketball team stays in a hotel the night before a home game.

Even on longer trips, Ivy League players aren’t always allowed to leave early. Three seasons ago, guard James Blackwell of Dartmouth couldn’t get out of a Friday morning English exam, so after finishing the test, he had to hitch a ride with fans making the seven-hour drive from Hanover, N.H., to Princeton that night.

An exhausted Blackwell did not play in his team’s 66-43 defeat.

--Redshirting, per se, is not permitted in the Ivy League, although an athlete may apply for reinstatement of a missed season of eligibility because of medical or financial hardship. If granted the extra season, however, the athlete must drop out during his “redshirt” year.

Because of a bad back, Carrabino dropped out of Harvard before his junior year. He returned home to Encino to live with his parents, took a job and recuperated, then returned to Harvard for the 1984 season.

He was the Ivy League player of the year as a junior.

--Study halls are not permitted.

Athletes, like all other students, are on their own.

“I don’t know if you can do a good job here as a salesman,” Carril said. “You have to really lay out the stuff and say (to a recruit), ‘It’s going to be hard. Do you want to study? You’re on your own.’ You have to be a certain kind of person to be attracted to that kind of talk.”

--Athletic scholarships have never been offered in the Ivy League and probably never will be, Orleans said.

“Of course we’d talk about it,” said Carrabino, who is now an investment banker in New York after playing professionally for two seasons, one in Europe and one in Australia.

“Were we envious? I would say the answer to that was no. We realized we were doing something different by going to an Ivy League school. You realize you’re going to be forfeiting a lot of the things that people who go to Duke or UCLA enjoy--training table, lots of TV coverage, large stadiums with lots of fans.

“Of course, anybody who plays sports enjoys those perks, but I think the people I played with understood that basketball wasn’t everything in their life. Everyone would have loved to play in the NBA, but I think everyone realized that the chances of that were pretty slim.

“They were just there to enjoy their four years, play as hard as they could and, when they graduated, go on to something else.”

So why, then, can’t Carril find any powers to play his teams?

Princeton under Carril has developed a reputation as a giant-killer, beating North Carolina, Notre Dame, Alabama, Indiana and St. John’s over the years and scaring such coaching luminaries as John Wooden, John Thompson and Rollie Massimino.

During its run of 10 national championships in 12 seasons under Wooden, UCLA needed a jump shot by Sidney Wicks with three seconds left to beat Princeton in a 1969 game at Pauley Pavilion, 76-75.

Carril inquired last summer about scheduling UCLA again, but the Bruins balked at the home-and-home arrangement he offered.

UCLA isn’t alone in dodging Carril, whose teams’ 1950s-style approach can be maddening to opponents and their fans. Nine times in the last 16 seasons, Princeton has led the nation in scoring defense, in part because it plays keep-away with the ball.

Nobody wants to lose to an Ivy League team, even if it’s Princeton.

“Our league has an egghead image in all sports,” Carril said. “So, as a result, if you were to lose to a team like that, it would tarnish your reputation as a basketball power.”

And it would only add to the legend of Pete Carril.