Stanford Just Plays It Smart

As a high school senior in Texas, Ryan Mendez averaged 38.2 points a game. He once scored 72 points in a game. He averaged 18.3 rebounds one season. But as flashy as those numbers sound, there was one more that Mendez produced as the student-body vice president of Burleson High--a 3.7 grade-point average.

This means that Mendez knew how to break down a half-court zone trap in basketball and how to navigate the Dewey Decimal System in the library. It also meant one other thing. He was just right for Stanford.

Students from this campus have gone on to become Nobel laureates 12 times and Supreme Court justices four times, so if you’re considering institutes of higher learning, Stanford is so far up there you might need to pack an oxygen tank for class.

At the same time, they’re doing just fine in athletics. And no, they don’t play like geeks with a bunch of pens stuffed in their pockets or slide rules falling out of their shorts. Stanford annually dominates the list of the top athletic programs in the NCAA in spite of its notoriously stringent requirements for admission. About 85% of the students who apply to attend Stanford are turned down.

Mendez considers himself fortunate that he was not. He is a jump-shooting economics major and a senior on Coach Mike Montgomery’s third-ranked Cardinal basketball team that is one of the most successful programs in the nation.

Like everyone else in Montgomery’s program, Mendez will graduate, but that’s a given because every player in the 15 years Montgomery has been at Stanford has received his degree. Mendez wants to play in the NBA, like his former Cardinal teammate Mark Madsen, who is now a Laker. But if that doesn’t work out, he is preparing for a career as an investment banker.

This is a long way from what Mendez had in mind when he began high school in Texas and didn’t consider going to Stanford. He had a good reason too.

“I never even heard of them,” Mendez said.

Montgomery has changed all that. You make the NCAA tournament eight times--six in a row--and you turn around a program that had two winning seasons in the previous 19 years, well, you sort of get noticed. What’s more, you become successful at a place where the science lab is much more revered than the basketball court and you’ve actually done something special.

Last season, the 53-year-old from Long Beach was named the Pacific 10 Conference coach of the year and the Naismith college coach of the year. Somehow, that doesn’t seem enough. For what Montgomery has done at Stanford, they should bronze him now and prop him up right there on the sideline at Maples Pavilion. Either that, or name a neutron after him.

Before Montgomery arrived, Stanford hadn’t been to the NCAA basketball tournament in 44 years. But, boy, did it crank out those Nobel laureates.

Montgomery’s predecessor at Stanford, Tom Davis, resigned in 1986 because he didn’t think he could win consistently with the academic pressures and standards. When Montgomery began to win, he started getting better players and the process began repeating.

Ted Leland, the athletic director, has witnessed the evolution of Stanford as a brain school to Stanford as a basketball powerhouse.

“The source of a coach’s frustration is also the source of our strength,” Leland said.

In other words, players view the Stanford experience as a positive one.

“[As] an outstanding basketball player in the ‘80s, would you go to Stanford?” Leland said. “[If] you were a great student looking for a great school, you wanted to play for a national championship. You could do both at UCLA or Duke. Now, you can do both at Stanford.”

About 91% of Stanford athletes earn degrees in six years--94% of the football players and 100% of the basketball players. The overall graduation rate for the student body is 94%.

Mendez was heavily recruited by Ohio State, Michigan State, Syracuse and North Carolina but settled on Stanford. Even though Montgomery wanted him, Mendez needed to write an essay as part of his application process because the school demands it. As Leland explained, there is no need to continue recruiting a player if his application is denied by the admissions office.

Mendez wrote his paper on Larry Bird’s autobiography, the story of a slow player, a plugger who just got the job done. It must have been a hit because Mendez was granted admission to Stanford, which isn’t that easy. Leland says there are usually about 18,000 applications a year for a freshman class that numbers about 2,500.

As one who made it, Mendez shares court time with an urban studies major (Jarron Collins), a science and technology major (Tony Giovacchini) and a fellow economics major (Jason Collins). In his personal file, Mendez lists the three people he would most like to have dinner with--Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro, Alan Greenspan--and sometimes wonders how other players at other schools are doing in their studies.

“I think some other athletes don’t have to do anything and still make their grades,” he said.

It is this unusual combination of educational and athletic prowess that is the hallmark of Stanford these days. Right now, Montgomery is riding a wave, despite the recruiting deficit of tiny, outdated Maples Pavilion--at 7,391 seats, the smallest in the conference.

Many believe that Stanford’s resurgence in recruiting and, ultimately, its success on the court, began with Brevin Knight in 1994. Knight, a flashy point guard from East Orange, N.J., made it fashionable for African-Americans to play at Stanford, which for many years fielded teams that looked more like five guys at a country club party.

In Knight’s four years at Stanford, the Cardinal improved from 17-11 to 20-9 to 21-8 and then 22-8, worth a trip to the round of 16.

“He broke down some stereotypes,” Montgomery said. “Brevin had baggy shorts, a little bit of talk, a little bit of swagger. . . . Before, kids didn’t perceive us this way, of our having Brevin’s type of player.”

Leland also credited Knight with breaking new ground for Stanford basketball.

“He set an example that African-American athletes could succeed in Mike Montgomery’s system,” Leland said. “I think that helped. The other thing that helped [get quality athletes] is a winning program.”

Before you have athletes and a winning program, you have to get them admitted. Stanford likes to say it has no minimum standards, that it rejects more students with 4.0 grade-point averages than it admits, that it judges each application individually.

“We judge the whole application,” Leland said.

Montgomery identifies for the admissions office the players he is recruiting--there are usually three or four scholarships available each year--and works closely with Joan Lippman, the admissions office liaison to the athletic department.

Susan Burk, who works in student services for compliance and eligibility, said applications for admission are accepted or rejected on overall “strength of the file,” which includes, among other things, grades, test scores, teacher recommendations and writing samples.

She says that as a general rule, student-athletes have better grades during their athletic season, not when they are off.

“The reason is they have to be focused,” Burk said. “There is no time for slacking.”

There is also very little margin for error in recruiting--because the pool of players who are Stanford-caliber is very small. Say there are only two blue-chip point guards in the country that carry the necessary credentials for Stanford. If Montgomery can’t persuade either one to come to Stanford, he’s looking at the No. 30 point guard in the country.

For instance, Stanford lost out on recruiting such players as Jacque Vaughn, Trajan Langdon, Corey Maggette and Mike Dunleavy Jr.

As Leland said: “There’s very little fallback room.”

If you add to that situation the chance that the admissions office could turn down someone Montgomery wanted, the fact that Stanford basketball has been so successful recruiting top athletes is a credit to a complicated system that seems to work.

“We’ve been disappointed at times,” Montgomery said of the basketball office’s relationship with the admissions office. “They don’t have to explain anything to us, but they’ve been real good about doing just that.

“We may have butted heads in the past. Maybe we didn’t have as good an understanding of what it took. This place can be a little intimidating.”

Note to Montgomery: If it’s any comfort, that’s also the way it looks to all the teams that have to play you.

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Cardinal Rule

Stanford basketball under Coach Mike Montgomery, right:

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Season Record Pac-10 NCAA tournament 1999-00 27-4 15-3 lost in second round 1998-99 26-7 15-3 lost in second round 1997-98 30-5 15-3 lost in national semifinals 1996-97 22-8 12-6 lost in regional semifinals 1995-96 21-8 13-5 lost in second round 1994-95 20-9 10-8 lost in second round 1993-94 17-11 10-8 not in tournament 1992-93 7-23 2-16 not in tournament 1991-92 18-11 10-8 lost in first round 1990-91 20-13 8-10 not in tournament 1989-90 18-12 9-9 not in tournament 1988-89 26-7 15-3 lost in first round 1987-88 21-12 11-7 not in tournament 1986-87 15-13 9-9 not in tournament 288-143 154-98 8 times in 14 seasons

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