Jeremy Lin’s high school coach says race hindered opportunities

As a senior at Palo Alto High in 2006, Jeremy Lin was the San Francisco Chronicle’s player of the year.

The point guard who would go on to become a New York Knicks sensation also had zero scholarship offers.

But his high school coach, Peter Diepenbrock, said he never thought Lin’s being an Asian-American might have caused college coaches to stay away because the Central Coast Section of about 125 schools typically produces only three Division I college players in a five-year period.

Diepenbrock’s perception changed the next year, he said, when 10 Division I coaches scouted a black Palo Alto player whom Diepenbrock described as someone who “could have been a nice junior college player.”

“That’s when I’m going, there might be something to this here,” Diepenbrock said. “If [Lin] was African-American or Caucasian, it might have been a different deal.”

St. Mary’s and Santa Clara were among the schools that came closest to offering scholarships, Diepenbrock said. Lin also considered attending UCLA merely to be close to his older brother Josh, then a student in Westwood.

“He told me as late as his junior year he wanted to go to UCLA and just be with his brother,” Diepenbrock said.

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