Matt Meltzer: Harvard: Strike while the iron is hot

Athletic director Bob Scalise and the Harvard athletic department fired long-time basketball coach Frank Sullivan at the beginning of the month. Now that he is gone, the Crimson have an exceptional opportunity to move their basketball program forward.

Harvard needs to look at its program as one that needs to be revamped, not one that is on the precipice of greatness. Sullivan recruited and developed great players at Harvard, including Matt Stehle, Patrick Harvey and Dan Clemente. Yet Harvard never had any great teams.

The next coach will not come into a barren program, Evan Harris may be one of the most athletic players in the league and Drew Housman heads a solid if unspectacular backcourt. Harvard needs a lot of help to reach Ivy champion status, though.

Players such as Stehle and Brian Cusworth prove that Harvard has the ability to recruit talented players on the Harvard name alone. After all, high-school players are not being sold on a program that has never won an Ivy title and has not been to the NCAA tournament since 1946.

So Harvard needs a dynamic coach who will attract talent. Columbia had the right idea by hiring the personable and passionate Joe Jones, who was a master recruiter at Villanova. An exciting personality is necessary to reinvigorate an apathetic fan base too. Harvard averaged just 1,250 fans per game in Lavietes Pavilion, good for sixth in the Ivy League. When Harvard hosted Penn, no more than half of the 2,995 fans could have been rooting for the Crimson.

Harvard should look for a young, ambitious coach. It is far more important to move this program in an upward direction than to find someone who will patrol the sideline for the next 16 years. An ambitious coach will seek to make the program great so he can advance his own career.

Harvard is not going to get a big-name coach. That is simply not the way the Ivy League operates. However, Harvard can hire a coach who was an assistant to a big-name coach or a program in a power conference.

In order for any coach to be successful at Harvard, the school and the athletic department need to make a conscientious effort to provide the appropriate resources to whoever they hire.

Penn coach Glen Miller is on the record as saying, "It's disheartening to me because coach Sullivan is first and foremost a terrific person. . I think it's a poor decision, but they made it, and you just wonder if they gave him the support that he needed to be successful there. It's just disheartening from my standpoint."

Sullivan probably did not get the appropriate support. According to midmajority.com, Harvard - which did not return my calls - spent $516,456 on its hoops program in 2006, seventh in the Ivy League and 312th out of 331 Division I teams. The investment is not just in the coach's salary, but in travel expenses, promotions, and recruiting.

The Crimson have the potential for an exciting program. They play for the one of the best schools in the world, in a great city, which has a large and wealthy alumni base. Harvard has the potential for a historic turnaround; let us hope that Mr. Scalise makes a wise choice.

Matt Meltzer is a senior political science major from Glen Rock, N.J. His e-mail address is meltzerm@sas.upenn.edu.

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