Basketball News

Nothing Imus-related here. Really!

Harvard hires a new men's basketball coach, less than two weeks after the Boston Globe reported that Harvard has no black coaches for their 41 varsity sports. The new hire: Tommy Amaker, the former Duke All-American and coach of Seton Hall and Michigan. Yes, he's black. Good for them.

LSU has hired Pokey Chatman's replacement: It is Van Chancellor, the former Olympic, Houston Comets of the WNBA, and Ole Miss coach. Chancellor has announced that he will keep Bob Starkey, the white male assistant who took over after Chatman left, and would consider keeping the other female assistants including Carla Berry, the coach who blew the whistle on Chatman.

My sister predicted to me a month ago that Pokey Chatman's replacement would be a white male, and that a lot of the southern schools with coaching vacancies would hire white males. On this one she was right. But Texas hired Gail Goestenkors (away from Duke) and Duke offered their job to former Duke player Joanne Boyle (who turned down the job and is staying at Cal.) It will be interesting to see what happens at Kentucky, where longtime Pat Summit assistant Micki DeMoss unexpectedly resigned after four years. She put Kentucky on the women's basketball map; hope she enjoys retirement.

Rutgers in NCAA Women's Basketball Final

Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer yells to her team during the first half of the women's semifinal basketball game against Louisiana State at the Final Four Sunday, April 1, 2007, in Cleveland.(AP Photo/Mark Duncan)
Rutgers over LSU in the first semi-final, 59-35.

The ESPN announcers kept talking about sainted Bob Starkey and what a great job he's done taking over for Pokey Chatman at LSU, but that he doesn't want to be a head coach. However, they never mentioned the fact that his lack of desire to be a head coach was killing LSU in this game. Tale of the tape: Rutgers had two great head coaches (C. Vivian Stringer and Marianne Stanley, her assistant) and LSU had a head coach who didn't ever want to be a head coach. It shows in the final score.

NYTimes had a nice profile of Marianne Stanley this week. But how do they miss the most important part of her coaching history? She's the coach who got fired (by USC) for daring to ask to be paid equally to the men's coach. Women coaches never forget it. When she can't get a head job in the game, great coaches like Tara VanDerveer and C. Vivian Stringer hired her as their assistant. The New York Times ignores women's basketball 99% of the time; maybe they just don't have a reporter on staff who knows the game well enough to know this essential fact.