The True Heart of Coaching
A Class Act at Any Level
Shortly after I returned home from the Final Four in 2007, I got a phone call from Tommy Amaker. I had known Amaker since his high school days at W.T. Woodson High School in northern Virginia and had gotten to know him well when he was Duke’s starting point guard for four years in the mid-1980s.
He had gone on to coach—first as an assistant at Duke under Mike Krzyzewski, then as the head coach at Seton Hall and Michigan. He’d been fired after six years at Michigan because he had never quite been able to dig out of the “Fab Five” scandals of the 90s.
He got right to the point of the call. “I have a chance to get the Harvard job,” he said. “What do you think?”
As it happened, I had a lot of thoughts. Harvard had just fired Frank Sullivan after 16 seasons. Reporters aren’t supposed to call coaches friends but Frank was a friend. In fact, we’d talked once about me coming to Harvard for a season to work as an assistant coach and write a book about it. Most Division I basketball teams have four assistant coaches—more nowadays—and Frank never had more than two. Even I might have been of some help.
Frank had been fired for reasons I consider very unfair and short-sighted. I learned from several sources that the Athletic Director was willing to bounce him because one over-zealous alumnus had offered to donate $1 million ear-marked for basketball if the AD got rid of Frank.
“You can’t take the job under the same conditions Frank worked under,” I told Tommy. “They made the academic standards for basketball much higher than any other Ivy League school. They had eligibility rules no one else had to deal with. They gave him NO financial support. He coached with one-hand tied behind his back for 16 years and kept Harvard respectable.”
There was a long silence. Then Tommy said, “Do you think Frank would be willing to talk to me?”
I honestly wasn’t sure. Frank had just been fired by the school after giving heart-and-soul to it for a long time. Why would he want to do anything to help Harvard?
“I’ll ask him,” I said.
Which I did.
Frank answered instantly and without equivocation. “Of course I’ll talk to him,” he said. “I recruited all those kids he’d be coaching. I want them to have the best coach they possibly can. I think Tommy would be perfect for Harvard.”
That was a classic case of me under-estimating the goodness that exists in some people. Anger at Harvard never crossed Frank’s mind. What was best for his players was all he thought about—even when they were no longer his players.
The two men talked. Amaker took the job under conditions very different from those Frank coached under. Harvard basketball has thrived. The men’s basketball team has become a unifying force on campus.
Looking back now, I realize there was no way Frank was NOT going to talk to Tommy when I asked him. It is who he is and has always been.
He never complained about the lack of support he received from Harvard while coaching there. He considered it an honor to coach at the school and loved coaching the players he recruited—among them Jeremy Lin, who would go on to stardom in the NBA. Most of those he recruited have gone on to very successful lives without basketball, which, at a school like Harvard, is supposed to be an important part of a coach’s job.
With one week left in the 2007 season, Harvard’s Athletic Director Bob Scalise called Frank in to tell him his contract wasn’t going to be renewed. He suggested that Frank should announce he was resigning, to “save face.”
Frank recently told me how he’d responded: “Are you kidding me? I push these kids every day to never quit, to work as hard as they can, to never give up in a game, and you want me to say that I QUIT? No way. You’ll have to fire me.”
There were two games left in the season—at Cornell and at Columbia. Frank said nothing to his players about the fact that they would be his last two games as Harvard’s coach. He didn’t want them feeling any extra “win one for the Gipper” pressure.
Harvard lost a tight game at Cornell, then won the finale at Columbia. With a four-hour bus trip back to Cambridge still ahead, Frank said nothing to his players during the journey because he wanted them to enjoy the victory on the way home, not brood about what had happened to their coach.
The next day he walked across the Charles River bridge that leads from Harvard’s athletic facilities to the campus to see them in their dorm rooms. He asked them to meet by class—seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshmen.
“They were at different stages of their Harvard lives and I wanted my message to them to reflect that. Obviously, it was a lot different for the seniors than it was for the freshmen.”
He did begin each meeting the same way. “I said, ‘Something has happened to me that I hope never happens to you in your lives: I’ve been asked to leave a job that I truly love. I hope this never happens to you but be prepared in case it does.’”
After his last meeting, he walked back across the bridge to his parking spot behind Lavietes Pavilion. He had already cleaned out his office before the last road trip. “I got in the car and drove over the nine speed bumps between there and gate six,” he said. “I drove out the gate and I’ve never gone back.”
Amaker has often credited Sullivan for putting Harvard in position to have the success it has had in his tenure—seven 20+ win seasons; four NCAA Tournament bids. A couple of years ago when they ran into one another at a game, Amaker suggested that Sullivan should come back to see Harvard play as his guest.
“I told him no thanks,” Frank said. “I appreciated the gesture. But when I drove out that gate, that was it for me.”
Nowadays, Frank is the basketball coach at Newton Country Day School of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls school near his home where his daughter Katy is director of communications. It was Katy who asked her father if he’d consider coaching the team when the job came open in 2018. A lot of coaches who had coached at the level Frank had coached would have laughed at the notion.
“Coaching is coaching,” he said. “I love being back in the gym. I love working with the kids.”
The school was founded in 1880 and among its graduates are Rose Kennedy and Jane Curtin. But it had never had a winning season in basketball until two years ago—Frank’s second season. A year ago, it had its second winning season. At Christmas break this winter, the Falcons were 4-1.
Coaching matters.
And so does Frank Sullivan, regardless of where he coaches or whose life he happens to be touching at a given moment. He is the classic example of a class act.
John Feinstein is one of the world’s most prolific and respected sports journalists, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, and a member of six Halls of Fame. His 47 books include two #1 New York Times bestsellers; a third, Caddy for Life, which became an award-winning documentary on Golf Channel; and a fourth, the novel Last Shot, which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for mystery writing in the Young Adult category. He also a does color commentary for VCU, George Mason, and Longwood basketball, the Navy radio network, and is a regular on The Sports Junkies. John lives in Potomac, Maryland, about 10 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.
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In The Engine Under the Hood, it's remarkable to see how much/be reminded that the qualities of selflessness and humility have to do with being an admirable person.
Leadership at its best - leaders put their teams ahead of themselves. Thanks for the great essay!