Before N.B.A. Passed on Jeremy Lin, Many Colleges Did (original) (raw)
Basketball|For Lin, Erasing a History of Being Overlooked
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For Lin, Erasing a History of Being Overlooked
- Feb. 12, 2012
Jeremy Lin played high school basketball in a gymnasium across the street from the Stanford campus. But the coaches there did not seriously recruit him. Neither did the coaches from U.C.L.A. The same for the coaches from many Ivy League universities.
“We all felt the same way: we could get better,” said Steve Donahue, the former coach at Cornell.
The story of Lin’s college recruitment illustrates how talent evaluators overlooked his ability even when Lin was young. It is something that was repeated in the professional ranks as he moved from Golden State to Houston to New York, where he has infected Knicks fans with Linsanity, becoming a sensation over five transcendent games.
Lin has scored at least 20 points in five straight games, all of them Knicks victories, becoming an instant fan favorite. He is also the first N.B.A. player to have at least 20 points and 7 assists in each of his first four starts.
All of that would have been hard for some college coaches to have predicted while watching film of Lin as a skinny, average-shooting guard at Palo Alto High School, even though he was a standout for the modest program, leading it to a 32-1 record and an upset of the powerhouse Mater Dei in the 2006 California Division II championship game.
“He was a good student, a good player and, yeah, it’s amazing what he was doing,” Donahue, now the coach at Boston College, said in a recent telephone interview. “But he didn’t look that athletic and he didn’t shoot it all that well. Even after his freshman year at Harvard, you didn’t give it a second thought that we made a mistake.”
It was not that college coaches were entirely unaware of Lin. On the contrary, Lin sent film of himself to programs in the Ivy and the Patriot Leagues. But he has said that only Harvard and Brown showed serious interest in him.
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