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      J.R. Smith Was Lost After the NBA. Golf Became His Guide.

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      LOS ANGELES — As J.R. Smith eased his golf cart around the fifth hole at El Caballero Country Club, he relayed a story about elementary school.He thought he would grow up to be a writer. His teachers gave him notebooks and, for inspiration, picture cards — say, a boy, a mountain and a scary house — and he’d write stories for hours. He loved it, at least initially.“Then school just wasn’t my thing, and writing and dyslexia — barely could read at times,” Smith said. “It was just like, ‘Yeah, this ain’t for me.’”For a long time, it wasn’t. By his senior year at St. Benedict’s in Newark, he was a basketball star committed to play at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But about a month before the N.B.A. draft in June 2004, he decided to skip college and go straight to the pros. The New Orleans Hornets took him with the 18th overall pick. Making it to the league was a dream.“I just wish I was more mature at the time, opposed to being so young-minded,” Smith said, adding: “I was 18, but I was more — at a mature sense — I was 13.”He spent 16 N.B.A. seasons launching feathery jumpers in New Orleans, Denver, New York, Cleveland and Los Angeles. He had shirtless championship celebrations, and the Cavaliers suspended him for throwing soup at an assistant coach. He won the Sixth Man of the Year Award, and the N.B.A. fined him for “posting inappropriate pictures” on Twitter. His teammate LeBron James once looked at him in disbelief during the N.B.A. finals, and the moment became a meme. Then one day, it was all over.Smith with the Larry O’Brien Trophy after winning 2020 N.B.A. finals with the Lakers.Kim Klement/USA Today Sports, via ReutersIt can be disorienting for players when the N.B.A. carousel stops. Smith was bored and puzzled when no team called to sign him after he won a championship with the Lakers in 2020. He spent hours in his game room, smoking and ruminating. I’m not playing. I should be playing. I want to play.Basketball was all he’d known in his adult life. But soon he had a new thought: Maybe it was time to go back to school.“I always wanted to learn about my heritage, learn where I came from, learn more about Black people,” Smith said. “It really turned into self-love, learning more about myself. That’s really what catapulted me back into therapy, to try to understand, and try to really master myself, and master my mind.”‘Get Away From the Chaos’Smith teed off, his golf ball hissing as it cut through the air. The ball hooked left. He grimaced.“On the court, I know what to rely on,” he said quietly. “Out here, I don’t know what to rely on.”It was a cloudless, brisk day, and he was with a longtime friend, C.J. Paul, the brother of Phoenix Suns guard Chris Paul, and a few other people. Smith got into golf after Moses Malone, the Hall of Fame center, encouraged him to pick up a club at a pro-am event in Houston. On his first try, Smith drove the ball around 300 yards, but he could not do it again. The contradiction fascinated him.“It gives me something else to focus on other than my life,” Smith said. “It gives you lessons at the same time. For me, any time I get away from the chaos a little bit, that’s what it’s all about.”“Respect. That’s what I like about it the most,” Smith said of golf. “You’ve got to put the time in. You ain’t just come out here and think you’re Tiger Woods.”Michael Owens for The New York TimesDuring a round of golf a few years ago, Smith confided to C.J. Paul that he was considering attending college. Paul suggested that Smith also play golf at school. He put Smith in touch with Richard Watkins, the men’s and women’s varsity golf coach at North Carolina A&T, a historically Black university in Greensboro. At the time, Smith’s knowledge of H.B.C.U.s consisted of their famed drum lines and a vague recollection of some episodes of “A Different World,” a spinoff of “The Cosby Show” based at a fictional H.B.C.U.In the fall of 2021, at 36 years old, Smith was in North Carolina A&T’s freshman class, becoming one of several Black athletes — including Chris Paul, Deion Sanders, Eddie George and Mo Williams — who turned to H.B.C.U.s later in life for schooling or jobs.“There is something about a space in which you don’t have to grapple with race as the predominant variable of your experience,” said Derrick White, a professor of history and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. “Black colleges, even though they’re multiracial, the history and culture of those institutions provide a space for Black folk to live and learn and experience higher education without having consistent battles about whether you deserve to be here or people saying that you’re undeserving of your spot.”Smith walked onto the men’s golf team, took classes about African American history and hired a tutor, whom he credited with being patient. Beverly C. Grier, who teaches a class about race and social justice that Smith is taking, said it was “very admirable” for him to pursue a degree at his age. Students who return to learning after a hiatus are often more focused and determined, Dr. Grier said, adding that Smith had gone above and beyond on a recent assignment.Smith earned a 4.0 grade-point average and the Aggies’ Academic Athlete of the Year in his first year. He proudly shared his accomplishment on social media.Smith walked onto the golf team at N.C. A&T in 2021.Grant Halverson/Getty Images“Every day, locking in, sitting at the computer, trying to come up with a regimen of how to learn how to think,” Smith said. “Breaking down barriers of anxiety and feeling not able to do certain things, because I’ve always felt like that toward school.”He has also been going to therapy again.Smith said the N.B.A. required him to go to therapy when he played for the Knicks, but he hated it. “It felt like my story, my journey, was so much different than everybody else’s,” he said. “I didn’t feel like it would help at the time.”He said he went on and off for two years.“He was so much of a man-child coming out of high school,” said Jim Cleamons, a New Orleans assistant coach when Smith was a rookie. Cleamons added: “I’ve always thought J.R. could do what he wanted to do. He just needed to find out what he wanted to do and dedicate himself to that purpose.”The N.B.A.’s lifestyle provided a mostly inflexible calendar: shoot-arounds, practices and games packaged around flights and hotel stays. But it had holes, countless empty hours sandwiched into the middle of days and late at night.“I’ve got to continuously move around,” Smith said. “Because once I sit still, that’s when stuff starts spinning for me. I’ve got to stay busy, stay active, continuously creative, continuously doing something. It’s like that old saying, a wandering mind, an idle mind is the devil’s playground, and for me, a lot of the times where I got in my troubles, and stuff like that, it was because I was bored.”In 2009, Smith was sentenced to serve 30 days in jail after pleading guilty to reckless driving in a crash that killed his friend, Andre Bell. In court, he said it was “unbearable to deal with.” By then, he had been traded to the Denver Nuggets. He was solidifying his reputation as a scorer, though one with a curious shot selection that caused conflict with some of his coaches.Smith, shown in the 2005 dunk contest, won two N.B.A. championships and the 2012-13 Sixth Man of the Year Award.Pool photo by Mark J. Terrill“I felt like I was an artist,” Smith said. “And I was sensitive about how I worked at my game and the different shots I took because if anything, I would feel like I was getting something out of it. And if I can’t get what I want out of it, then how can I give you what you want? This is something I love.”An Uncertain FutureIn the N.B.A., Smith searched for an empty gym when he faced turmoil. There he found movement and expression. Golf, Smith discovered, enveloped him the same way.“You’re out there literally by yourself,” he said. “Even if you’re with somebody, it’s still such an individual sport. You can really zone out and, for me anyway, find that same peace and that same energy.”Though Smith plays golf at an H.B.C.U., the sport at large is still overwhelmingly white. Smith said he is conscious of the lingering stares he receives on golf courses that seem to go beyond people recognizing him from his days in the N.B.A.“Certain people’s aura and demeanor like they don’t want you here,” Smith said. “It’s that old money that just ain’t going to change.”He wants to make golf more accessible, especially for women and minorities. “I’ve got four girls who play sports and I’m around a lot of country clubs where it’s not as welcome for women as it is for men in the game of golf,” he said.Smith is spending more time away from the campus this year, taking classes online and podcasting.Michael Owens for The New York TimesSmith played 12 rounds in four tournaments as a freshman with an average score of 85.58. Smith is not on North Carolina A&T’s campus as much this year. He had arrived in Los Angeles that week to shoot episodes with the celebrity jewelry maker Ben Baller and the fashion designer Stephen Malbon for their podcast, “Par 3,” about their love for golf. Smith takes most of his classes online and prefers training with professional golfers in Florida.Nearly 20 years ago, Smith thought his school days were over, but his path seemed to be clear. Now, his plans are open-ended after college.He wants to be involved in golf. He’s interested in becoming an athletic director at an H.B.C.U. He may even coach children, he said, “teach them the game of basketball, as opposed to running and chucking, this new-age game.”From the eighth hole at El Caballero, Smith stood in the tee box, slightly bent forward at his waist and knees. He flushed the ball solidly down the fairway.“Respect,” Smith said, returning to his cart. “That’s what I like about it the most. You’ve got to put the time in. You ain’t just come out here and think you’re Tiger Woods.”Smith said it was his first good shot of the day and returned to his golf cart, his destination uncertain beyond the next hole.Michael Owens for The New York Times

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      Texas Longhorns Fire Basketball Coach After Domestic Assault Charge

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      Chris Beard, who was named head coach of the University of Texas men’s team in April 2021, was arrested in December and charged with a third-degree felony.Chris Beard was fired on Thursday as the head coach of the University of Texas men’s basketball team, weeks after he was arrested on a felony domestic violence charge in Austin.Chris Del Conte, the university’s vice president and athletic director, said in a statement on Thursday that the university had decided to terminate Beard’s contract effective immediately.Beard, 49, was suspended without pay on Dec. 12 after he was arrested and charged with assault on a member of a family or household by impeding breath circulation, a third-degree felony, according to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. Beard posted a cash bond of $10,000 and was released from jail the day of his arrest.Rodney Terry, the team’s associate head coach, has been serving as acting head coach of the Texas Longhorns men’s basketball team since Beard was suspended. Del Conte said that Terry would finish the season as the team’s acting head coach.“This has been a difficult situation that we’ve been diligently working through,” Del Conte said.The Austin Police Department said officers responded to a call about a disturbance at a home in Austin at around 12:15 a.m. on Dec. 12. The caller told the police that the disturbance had ended and that one person at the home had left, the police said in a statement. When the police arrived at the house, a woman told them that Beard had assaulted and choked her.Perry Minton, a lawyer for Beard, said in a statement on Thursday that Beard was “crushed at the news he will not be coaching at the University of Texas.”“At the outset of Coach Beard’s suspension, the university promised they would conduct an independent investigation surrounding the allegations and make a decision regarding his employment only after they had done so,” Minton said. “They proceeded to terminate Coach Beard without asking a single question of him or his fiancée.”The university declined to comment on its investigation.A few days after Beard was arrested, Randi Trew, Beard’s fiancée, said in a statement that her lawyer shared with The Associated Press that the two had engaged in a “physical struggle” after she broke his glasses in “frustration.” Beard, she added, “did not strangle me.”“Chris has stated that he was acting in self-defense, and I do not refute that,” she said. “I do not believe Chris was trying to intentionally harm me in any way. It was never my intent to have him arrested or prosecuted.” A university spokesman confirmed that Beard had been offered the opportunity to resign or have his contracted terminated by the university. Minton, Beard’s lawyer, told James Davis, the university’s vice president of legal affairs, in a letter on Thursday that the offer “came as a shock.”“With this, I want to be on record as emphatically stating, and herein memorializing, that Coach Beard has not done anything to violate any provision of his contract with the University of Texas,” Minton said in the letter. “He was arrested, then his fiancée retracted her previously reported statement.”The Texas Longhorns named Beard head coach in April 2021 after he spent five seasons as the head coach of the men’s basketball team at Texas Tech University, which he led to the N.C.A.A. national championship game in 2019.Before coaching the Longhorns, Beard was the head coach of the men’s basketball teams at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas; McMurry University in Abilene, Texas; Seminole State College in Seminole, Okla.; and Fort Scott Community College in Fort Scott, Kan. Beard graduated from the University of Texas in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology, the study of human motion. More

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      Sedona Prince Has a Good Feeling About the Next Era

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      For many, the basketball player’s TikTok was a before-and-after marker of how society talks about modern women’s sports. For Prince, there’s much to celebrate, more to be done and a W.N.B.A. roster spot to secure.The New York Times Sports department is revisiting the subjects of some compelling articles from the last year or so. In March, we covered Sedona Prince’s video and the way it challenged the disparities between the men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments. Here is an update.Sedona Prince sees her life in eras.There was the injury era, when she snapped her tibia and fibula just before the start of her freshman year of college; her practice-player era, when she mastered the playing style of future opponents; her “crazy” era, when she found her footing on and off the court as a college student; her depression era, when she was finally cleared to play and immediately injured herself again; her N.C.A.A. tournament era, when she was suddenly under the national spotlight for exposing gross disparities between men’s and women’s basketball; and her name, image and likeness era, when she learned how to monetize her work.These days, Prince is in what she calls her rebuilding era. And she’s only 22.A 6-foot-7 forward, Prince became a centerpiece for the University of Oregon women’s basketball program with her towering ability to find the open shot alongside Sabrina Ionescu, Ruthy Hebard and Satou Sabally. But in the course of defining herself on the court, she also helped to redefine the role of a college athlete.“I’m in a place now where I’m allowing myself to look back and trying to reminisce on all these times and process them because in the moment I couldn’t. It all happened way too fast; it was all happening at once,” Prince said in a recent interview from Los Angeles.Prince graduated from Oregon in the spring with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences with a focus in business and economics. She opted into her fifth season this fall and began to pursue a master’s degree, but during a practice before the season opener, she tore a ligament in her elbow, ending her season and college career at Oregon.“I wanted to keep playing; I love this team,” Prince said. “But I knew there’s no way I can keep playing. I have to take care of myself.”Still young in her career, Prince knows how to prioritize herself. All of her so-called eras have taught her as much. As one of the pioneering athletes of the N.I.L. era, Prince said she knew she could take the financial and professional risk of leaving college basketball to rehabilitate and pursue a coveted spot on a W.N.B.A. roster.“There are always less options for women — there’s less freedom,” she said. “There’s always that thing of like, oh, God, how am I going to support myself?”But getting to this point was far from linear. If every generation has its disrupters, Prince is chief among her peers. In one 38-second video, she lifted the curtain on a problem that was long talked about but that nobody had made so visually and abundantly clear.In 2021, Prince showed the glaring differences between what the N.C.A.A. had provided for workout facilities for the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments: The men, anchored in Indianpolis because of the pandemic, were provided an expansive ballroom filled with free weights, hand weights and machine weights. The women, based in San Antonio, had a stand with hand weights.Within days, Prince’s posts had been seen more than 13 million times on TikTok and Twitter, a number the N.C.A.A. could not ignore, despite its attempts to explain away some of the differences. The women’s workout room was eventually beefed up.“I had no idea what it would do, honestly,” Prince said. “Looking back, I wish I would have spoken up more. But I did all I could as a 19-year-old kid. I was figuring it out.”CNN and “Good Morning America” called. All of a sudden, Prince thought, “I’m now an activist.”Prince at an ESPN awards show in July. She said she would continue to use her platform for change. “It’s our duty as athletes.”Leon Bennett/Getty Images“I’ve always been about activism, but this was a stage that I had never been on,” she recalled. She also had to balance speaking up while not insulting the N.C.A.A.“I had no idea if I had broken the rules. There’s this constant fear of student-athletes — they are this reigning governing body and really scary people that we never get to see or hear,” Prince said. “I thought, have I just lost my college career?”Hardly. Five months later, an independent report detailed the structural gender inequities between the two tournaments. The 114-page report compared Prince’s video to “the contemporary equivalent of ‘the shot heard round the world.’”Many look at Prince’s TikTok as a before-and-after marker of how society talks about women’s sports. But for Prince, there is still much work to be done — it all comes down to a lack of respect.“It’s the worst part of it,” Prince said. “Every single time we go places, it’s just less and it’s just disrespect, and so we’re trained to think that, oh, this is normal. This is what we deserve.”Even for Prince, who quickly established herself as a leader in her sport, she often finds herself second-guessing her worth.“There are times where it’s like I have to pull myself out of that mentality of like, this is what it’s always been, this is what I deserve as a woman in sport, I’m just going to get less because we get less viewership,” Prince said. “And it’s like, no, that’s not, that’s not true. So I have to constantly check myself of like, Hey, you know, this is not correct. This is not right.”Prince said she would continue to use her platform for change. “It’s our duty as athletes,” she said. “When you feel like you should talk about something, you probably should. So when I have a platform, I’m like, OK, I should probably talk about this. And then I can see the ripple effects after that, which is the coolest part of it and see it’s actually working.” More

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      NYU vs. Chicago Men’s Soccer: A Match Between Two Women Coaches

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      An array of major college sporting events will kick off this weekend, many with huge audiences, on TV and in person. But perhaps the most significant game will take place at little Gaelic Park in the Riverdale section of the Bronx on Friday, when two men’s soccer teams coached by women will square off in a game that could help define a new standard.Kim Wyant is the head coach of New York University, which will host powerhouse University of Chicago, coached by Julianne Sitch. It is believed to be the first N.C.A.A. men’s soccer game in which both coaches are women.“This is definitely historic,” said Nicole LaVoi, a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota, who compiles annual data on the number of women coaching in college sports. “It’s a landmark occurrence.”A small number of women are coaching men in various roles at both the professional and college levels. Becky Hammon, now a head coach in the W.N.B.A., was hired as a full-time assistant for the N.B.A.’s San Antonio Spurs in 2014 and that league has had several women hired in assistant roles in the years since. A handful of women are coaches in the N.F.L. and in Major League Baseball. Rachel Balkovec just finished her first season as the manager for the Yankees’ Class A affiliate in Tampa, Fla.But the instances remain rare, particularly in college sports, where male coaches far outnumber women, even in women’s sports. Data published by the U.S. Department of Education shows that only about 5 percent of all men’s college teams are coached by women, and the majority of those are in low-revenue, combined-gender sports like skiing, swimming and track and field.The data also showed there are no women in head coaching positions in Division I football, baseball, men’s basketball and men’s soccer, and only about 26 percent of Division I women’s soccer coaches are women.Wyant broke the barrier in 2015, when she was hired by N.Y.U., a Division III school. The first goalie to play an international game for the United States women’s national team, she has led the Violets to five postseason appearances and has become the standard-bearer for women coaching a men’s team in a college team sport.She has also been a role model for many aspiring players and coaches, including Sitch, who until April was an assistant coach for the Chicago women’s team — just as Wyant had been an assistant for the N.Y.U. women’s team. When the Chicago men’s job opened up last winter, Sitch called Wyant and they spoke for about a half-hour. Sitch hung up inspired, feeling there was no reason she could not follow Wyant’s lead.“Prior to her, there wasn’t any other women coaching and leading men’s teams,” Sitch said. “She was obviously a positive influence and role model.”Kim Wyant became N.Y.U.’s head men’s soccer coach in 2015.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesJulianne Sitch is in her first season as the University of Chicago head coach.Anjali Pinto for The New York TimesNow, they are facing one another in a highly anticipated game that holds important social meaning, but also significance within the University Athletic Association, the teams’ conference. Sitch took over a team that went 16-6-1 last year, and this year the Maroons are 14-0 and ranked No. 1 in a Division III coaches’ poll.“It’s a really solid group of young men,” Sitch said. “It’s a tribute to the alums and former staff and the legacy that has been built here. It has been very positive and very inviting, across the board.”In the few months she has been recruiting high school athletes as a head coach, Sitch said she never sensed the slightest resistance from players and families about her gender. Wyant had told her on the phone that she had the same experience.“Players just want to know, ‘Can I get better?’” Wyant said at a recent N.Y.U. practice at Pier 40 in Manhattan. “They are looking for a leader who is invested in the team. Do we feel respected? Whether male or female, if you can deliver all of those things, you can succeed.”Five years ago, Wyant was on a recruiting trip in San Diego, visiting with the family of a player named Jet Trask. Also at the table that day was Trask’s younger brother, Ben, then a high school freshman. Jet Trask opted for Sacramento State, a Division I program, but Wyant made such an impression on young Ben that four years later he wanted to play for her.“Her experience and credentials were never in doubt,” Ben Trask, a sophomore midfielder, said. “I knew if I came here, I would be playing for a great coach. If I had it to do again, I would come here again.”Ben Trask, and Nicholas Suter, a senior co-captain, both said that most of their friends and high school teammates ask them what it is like to play for a woman coach, and both said they tell them there is no difference from playing for a man.“It’s amazing to play for her,” said Suter, who is from Long Island. “It was one of the perks of coming here.”Suter said Wyant has a unique ability to communicate with the players and get the most out of them. He recalled a dramatic first-round game in last year’s N.C.A.A. tournament, against St. Joseph’s College of Maine in New London, Conn. With N.Y.U. trailing, 2-1, and only 15 minutes remaining, the game was suspended because of lightning. The Violets trudged back to their hotel while organizers looked for a new field with lights.Wyant has led the Violets to five postseason appearances and has been a role model for many aspiring players and coaches, including Sitch.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesHiroko Masuike/The New York TimesOver a team dinner, while they waited three hours for a new field with a different playing surface, Wyant told the players that they were prepared for the situation. As a team in an urban setting, N.Y.U. often shuttles between various sites around New York for practices and games, and Wyant stressed that they were better suited to adapt to the uncertainties of the moment. Inspired, they went to the new field, where Suter scored the equalizer and N.Y.U. won, 3-2, in extra time.They may need similar magic to handle Chicago, which has rolled through its schedule under Sitch and produced a record that helps validate the decision to hire her.“We had the student-athletes be a part of the search and it was really important to see how they would react,” said Angie Torain, the Chicago athletic director. “They were just so positive, it was ridiculous. It’s because of her soccer knowledge and what she brings for them.”But according to Teresa Gould, the deputy commissioner of the Pac-12 Conference, one of the Power 5 leagues in Division I, far too few university administrators are making similar decisions. Gould is also the president of the board of WeCOACH, an organization dedicated to the development, support and retention of women in coaching at all levels. She says the numbers are troubling, especially 50 years after Title IX was adopted to promote equal participation and access to sports.But Title IX does not govern coaching hires. Gould points to LaVoi’s yearly data, compiled at the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, which reveals that only 42.7 percent of the coaches of women’s collegiate teams are women. In 1971, about 90 percent of coaches of women’s college teams were women.Sitch took over a team that went 16-6-1 last year, and this year the Maroons are 14-0.Anjali Pinto for The New York TimesGould said there has been a general exodus away from coaching as the pressures and demands of the jobs multiply under the weight of win-now approaches, financial imperatives and the exhausting influence of social media. She says coaching is a lifestyle commitment more than just a career, and it often hampers women more than men because of things like child care and travel.“It has become harder for women, who may still be the primary general managers of their households, to do both,” Gould said.That is why she is so excited about Friday’s game, hoping it will raise awareness and provide proof to girls, young women and especially college administrators, that coaching is a viable career path for women, regardless of the players’ gender.But the game, and the examples set by Wyant and Sitch, also provide strong female role models for boys and men, too.“It’s immensely important,” LaVoi said, “because we know from the data that when young men are exposed to female leaders in a context they care about, like sports, they have more egalitarian perceptions and beliefs about gender and leadership. Then they are more likely, as they graduate from college, to treat women as equals in the workplace and perhaps in their personal relationships.”For the N.Y.U. players, going through their paces at Pier 40 under Wyant’s watchful eye, their immediate concern is beating Chicago, a talented team that has only improved under Sitch’s leadership.“It will be historic, it will be special,” Wyant said. “I think it’s so appropriate that N.Y.U. is hosting it, because N.Y.U. is a major reason this is happening. They put me in this role and had the courage to make this decision. But our main focus right here is on trying to beat a really good team on Friday.” More

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      At the U.S. Open, Future College Tennis Stars Are an Unsung Draw

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      College coaches can be found across the U.S. Open’s outer courts during the juniors competitions, displaying their school colors while searching for the next star recruit.On an outer court at the U.S. Open, tucked into a far corner by the perimeter fencing, Raquel Gonzalez Vilar powered shots over the net in her first-round match of the junior girls’ draw. Two men dressed in orange and black, wearing white hats emblazoned with the words “Oklahoma State,” cheered her on.On a nearby court, a woman in a bright orange shirt with a fierce tiger on it chatted with a man wearing a black Georgia Tech shirt and hat. Across from them were two men in light blue shirts and hats with Columbia University tennis logos.They were not fans out for a fun afternoon of tennis-star gazing. They are college coaches who were dotted across the far courts for the juniors competitions, purposely displaying their school colors while searching for the next star recruit or protecting a committed player from a rival’s watchful eye.“All the coaches come here,” said Jamea Jackson, the incoming women’s head coach at Princeton and a former professional player who also scoured these grounds as an assistant at Oklahoma State. “The U.S. Open is integral to your recruiting calendar.”While competition on the courts at the U.S. Open is intense, the battle among these coaches in the stands and pathways is sometimes just as cutthroat, with dozens of coaches showing up each year to stock their rosters.In some cases, coaches introduce themselves after the players have finished for the day to plant a seed with players and eventually sign them.In other cases, the players have committed to a school, and the coaches are there to offer support and encouragement — and to prove their undying devotion. The two men in orange and black — Chris Young, the women’s tennis head coach at Oklahoma State and Jaime Sanchez-Cañamares, his top lieutenant — were watching Gonzalez Vilar.The coaches had already persuaded Vilar to attend Oklahoma State, but she was thrilled that they had shown up and celebrated her first-round win by jumping into their arms.“I really enjoyed today because they helped me along and gave me energy,” she said through an interpreter. “It was nice to have them here with me.”If you are not looking for these coaches, they could slip by, unnoticed. If you are, they are easy to spot behind their crisp shirts and hats in school colors. Over on Court 5, a man in University of Washington gear watched a match intently. Another, in a U.C.L.A. shirt, sat nearby, and across the way Arizona, Arizona State, Northern Arizona, Pepperdine, Mississippi and many more were represented, too.The U.S. Open is not the only tournament to which coaches flock. They also pop up (in fewer numbers) at events in Europe. But it is the big junior tournaments in Kalamazoo, Mich., and San Diego and the Orange Bowl event near Miami that, along with the U.S. Open, teem with college coaches dressed like models for athletic-department logo-wear.“You never see college coaches without their gear on,” said Parsa Nemati, a college tennis recruiting expert and marketing consultant for Universal Tennis Rating, who also serves as the social media coordinator for the Tennis Channel.Billy Pate, center, of Princeton University, said the gear coaches wore turned them into “billboards.” Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesBilly Pate, the men’s coach at Princeton, joked that the gear turned coaches into “billboards.” But it is important to fly the school’s colors, if only to grab the attention of the players.College tennis is an increasingly enticing alternative for young players who may not be ready for the rigors of the professional tour. For some players, college is an easy choice because of the potential opportunity for free coaching, free food, free training facilities, free medical attention and, in many cases, free education.According to Nemati, the recruiting expert, 21 of the 64 boys in the draw are committed to colleges and at least four more will soon declare. The number of girls is slightly lower, he said. The rest consider themselves good enough to turn professional or are still undecided.Most Americans and their families are aware of the college option. But Jordan Szabo, the assistant women’s coach at Texas A&M, said some of the international players were less aware and sought guidance.For Szabo, who is Australian, the U.S. Open is not very productive because so many coaches are there and most of the players are already spoken for. But like most coaches, he knows it is too important to pass up. On Monday, he had his eye on a hard-serving Australian girl and watched to evaluate the intangibles that do not appear on any rankings or stat sheets.Finding the right moment to say hello is an art, especially with other coaches lurking nearby. A coach may have to wait patiently while a rival filibusters with the player. No one wants to be the one to barge in on a conversation or appear too aggressive in front of the players.“It’s awkward,” Szabo said. “Yesterday, a girl walked up to me to say hi when another coach had been waiting. We had just spoken the day before, and she obviously felt it would be rude not to say hello. It can just be really awkward, but it’s part of it.”Pate, the Princeton men’s coach, said most coaches respectfully — but not always — backed off when a player had committed elsewhere. But there are other challenges to fend off. National tennis federations often do not want their players to attend college, preferring that they remain under the federation’s umbrella and then go pro. And agents, who profit when a player becomes a professional, can be an obstacle, too.Gina Suarez-Malaguti, a women’s associate head coach at Virginia, said she employed unique methods to gain a player’s interest and trust.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesGina Suarez-Malaguti, a women’s associate head coach at Virginia, has been recruiting at the U.S. Open for years. She said that at a big event such as the U.S. Open, juniors breathe the same intoxicating air and share the same hallways with top pros.“They are in a different cloud here,” Suarez-Malaguti said, “thinking anything is possible.”She employs unique methods to gain a player’s interest and trust.“I can’t tell you my secrets,” she smiled. “But, you’ve got to be creative.”Another danger can arise if a college-bound player does too well at a major event. Success at the top level can suddenly alter plans.“Sometimes, they need a bad loss to bring them back to earth and make them think about college,” said German Dalmagro, the associate head coach of the Illinois women’s team.Dalmagro, who also coached at Nebraska and Kansas, said there were many more coaches at the U.S. Open now than in previous years. The big tournaments are like conventions, and many coaches get along well. Some have even worked together at stops in their careers. Most greet one another cordially, but in an optimal world, each would be the only one there, with unfettered access to players.“We have a joke,” said Howard Endelman, the head men’s coach at Columbia, who was on site to watch his top recruit, Michael Zheng. “We always say, ‘Hi, nice to see you.’ But they don’t want to see me here, and I don’t want to see them.”Alexis Casati, an associate head coach of Georgia Tech women’s tennis, watching a girls’ match.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe big tournaments are like conventions, and many coaches get along well.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesCoaches also use social media, email and texts to reach out to players, beginning on June 15 of their sophomore year in high school. Matchmaking services, like Stars and Stripes Tennis Recruitment, connect under-scouted players, usually from overseas, with colleges. Some players fish for scholarships by listing preferences on websites.Daniil Medvedev, last year’s U.S. Open men’s champion and the current world No. 1, used such a tactic when he was a little-known junior, listing every Ivy League college as a school of interest to him.When Endelman saw that, he hopped on a plane for a junior tournament in Linz, Austria, to watch Medvedev. Endelman laughs at himself now, knowing what Medvedev has become.“I looked at his strokes, which are unorthodox, and I was like, ‘I don’t know,’” he said with a chuckle. “Shows what I know.”But he also knew enough to be on hand to support Zheng, lest some other coach in different colors gets too close. More

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      Steph Curry’s Graduation From Davidson Was a Long Time Coming

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      Curry, the N.B.A. superstar, returned to Davidson College, where he first showed how great he could be. The college, and its community, still feel his impact over a decade later.DAVIDSON, N.C. — On the first day of the fall semester in 2007, Stephen Curry sat in a class on gender and society at Davidson College, a small, liberal arts school 20 miles north of Charlotte, N.C.Prof. Gayle Kaufman, who was teaching the class, began the roll call alphabetically.At the end of the Cs, she called out, “Steven Curry?”The students erupted in laughter. Curry smiled. “It’s Steph-en,” he said, politely.Kaufman had been on sabbatical the year before, which was probably why she seemed to be one of the few people in Davidson — both the college and the town of 10,000 people then — who didn’t know how to pronounce his name.Five months before, Curry had led Davidson to the N.C.A.A. Division I men’s basketball tournament in his freshman season, gaining local celebrity status that would eventually be dwarfed by his superstardom as a four-time N.B.A. champion with Golden State. But to his fellow students, Curry was just one of them. He made funny videos with his friends, studied in the library and ate at the Outpost, the only late-night eatery on campus. Curry said he “was always a breakfast-at-night type guy.”“In hindsight, he’s obviously the best player in the world,” said Adah Fitzgerald (not pictured), the owner of Main Street Books in Davidson. The book store has one of Curry’s children’s books displayed in the front window.Travis Dove for The New York Times“Everyone is truly a student at Davidson,” said Jason Richards, Curry’s friend and college teammate. “There are no superstars. There’s no one walking the pathways like, ‘Oh, wow, there’s so-and-so.’ You knew who you’d pass on your way to class, and you knew everyone in class by first name. It’s what makes Davidson so special, and so special to Stephen: No one is bigger than the college itself.”But as the past few days showed, Curry comes close.‘Isn’t that the place where … ?’Marshall Oelsen walked into Stephen Curry’s freshman dorm room at the start of the fall 2006 semester and saw oversize pairs of Charlotte Hornets basketball shorts on the floor. He asked whose they were. Curry said they belonged to his father, Dell Curry, who spent 10 seasons with the Hornets.“Those first months, he was just known as Dell Curry’s kid,” said Oelsen, who lived down the hall.But one October afternoon, Bryant Barr, Stephen Curry’s roommate and teammate, told some friends: “Guys, Steph is the real thing. He’s going to be huge.”Chris Clunie, the school’s director of athletics, played on the men’s basketball team for four seasons before Curry arrived. “I describe Davidson basketball as B.S. and A.S. — Before Steph and After Steph,” Clunie said.Dell Curry, left, spent 16 seasons in the N.B.A. But to many people, he may be better known now as “Stephen Curry’s dad.”Clunie’s squad was successful, earning a No. 15 seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament the year before Curry came. But once Curry arrived? “It was a launchpad,” Clunie said.Curry became Davidson’s career leader in points and 3-pointers. The Wildcats made it to the tournament in his freshman and sophomore seasons, including a magical run to the round of 8 in 2008. Curry scored 40 points and made eight 3-pointers in a first-round upset of Gonzaga.After his junior year, Curry left for the N.B.A., and Golden State drafted him seventh overall.Chris Gruber, Davidson’s dean of admission and financial aid, said applications surged after the 2008 tournament run. “It allowed us to be known in many cases,” he said. “It put us on a map in terms of, ‘Isn’t that the place where …?’ ”Gruber said even now the school is “riding that wave.”Davidson men’s basketball relies heavily on recruiting international players. Coach Matt McKillop, whose father, Bob, coached Curry, said the first conversation often starts with the recruit saying, “I know Davidson — that’s where Steph Curry went.”Stephen Curry was — at least kind of — a normal college student. He said he liked to order milkshakes and sausage, egg and cheese bagels from Outpost, a late-night eatery on the Davidson campus.Jane Avinger and her husband, Bob Avinger, started attending games when they moved to Davidson in 1967. Curry, she said, made them go consistently. When the Wildcats made it to the round of 16 in Detroit in 2008, they bought plane tickets and traveled there to cheer on the team. “We’d never done anything like that,” she said.Signs of Curry are everywhere in town. The Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop on Main Street has a dipped, rainbow-sprinkle waffle cone called #30, after Curry’s jersey number. Sabor Latin Street Grill on Jetton Street has a large mural of Curry painted on a wall inside. At Main Street Books, a basketball-themed children’s book by Curry titled “I Have a Superpower” is displayed by the register.On Thursday, Curry announced that the basketball court at the Ada Jenkins Center, a nonprofit in Davidson, would be refurbished by his Curry Brand with Under Armour; the Eat.Learn.Play. Foundation he started with his wife, Ayesha Curry; and The Summit Foundation.During Davidson’s 2008 tournament run, hundreds of town residents hung bedsheets from their porches with words of support. This past week, with Curry returning to town for a special celebration, townspeople were encouraged to hang their sheets again. “Proud of you #30,” read one. “Congrats, Steph,” was written in black and red ink, Davidson’s school colors, on another.“It’s just so wild that he would end up here for college, to play for this team, because in hindsight, he’s obviously the best player in the world,” said Adah Fitzgerald, the owner of Main Street Books. “Like, what? He doesn’t even have to come back very often or have to pay much attention to us as a town — and we’ll just forever be die-hard fans.”‘I’ve never seen you smile like that’Some people had driven from as far as Florida to be among the nearly 5,000 people crowded into Belk Arena on Davidson’s campus on Wednesday. Mayor Rusty Knox of Davidson was there. Sai Tummala and Jack Brown, Davidson men’s soccer players who said they were drawn to the school because of Curry, were in floor seats with other students. So were Curry’s wife and the couple’s three children: Riley, 10; Ryan, 7; and Canon, 4.Finally, Stephen Curry was there, too.Dressed in cap and gown, he shook hands and offered hugs as the crowd cheered. Curry smiled as he took his seat in the front row next to Ayesha. Thirteen years after leaving Davidson, he had earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology. He missed the school’s graduation ceremony in May because he was a little busy trying to win his fourth N.B.A. championship. But now, Davidson was having a ceremony just for him.“I made a joke the other day: Would we put on an event like this if the president was coming to town?” said Joey Beeler, Davidson’s director of athletic communications.Afterward, Curry said it was “almost overwhelming.”Stephen Curry, right, with his family, left to right: Ayesha Curry, his wife; Riley and Ryan, his daughters; and Canon, his son.The ceremony also marked Curry’s induction into the school’s Athletics Hall of Fame and the retirement of his No. 30 jersey. Davidson had long required inductees to graduate first, but the rule was changed in 2019, in part, for Curry. Still, he refused the honor, wanting to wait until he’d graduated.He took classes in 2011, during an N.B.A. work stoppage, and in December 2019 he called Clunie, the director of athletics, to map out a plan to complete the final few classes for his degree. Then the coronavirus pandemic stalled his plans. But last winter, Curry called Clunie again.Clunie scheduled calls and video conferences with professors before practices, after shootarounds, even after games. Curry said he completed the bulk of his work in March and April, when he missed a dozen games with a foot injury.“Some of the professors had to tell him to slow down,” Clunie said.Kaufman, the gender and society professor, was his adviser for a thesis on advancing gender equality in sports. As the N.B.A. playoffs unfolded, Curry still hadn’t finished. Around midnight on a Wednesday, Kaufman received an email from Curry: “Dr. K, I want to assure you, I will have everything finished, and to you, by Friday night,” he wrote.“It was that moment where I was like, ‘holy, wow,’” Kaufman said. She added, “And sure enough, he finished the paper, and it was great.”Curry wrote a thesis on advancing gender equality in sports to complete his bachelor’s degree in sociology at Davidson.By completing his degree, Curry had given Bob McKillop, his college coach, a 100 percent graduation rate for his players during a 33-year tenure. McKillop, whom Curry has remained close with, retired in June, one day after Curry was named the most valuable player of the N.B.A. finals.“He has given this community, this college, this athletic department a gift that, in my judgment, is unparalleled — the gift being his time and his love,” McKillop said. “Those are the two most prized gifts that I believe we as human beings have.”At his graduation on Wednesday, Curry held up his diploma, grinning. He turned his tassel and threw his hat high into the air on the stage as the crowd cheered, cellphones held aloft.“Few alumni are as well known as you are, Stephen,” Doug Hicks, the president of Davidson, said during the ceremony. “OK, actually, none are.”Almost 5,000 people attended Stephen Curry’s graduation ceremony at Davidson on Wednesday. Some alumni traveled from Florida to attend.As Curry stepped to the podium as the afternoon’s final speaker, chants of “M-V-P!” rang out.“The best decision I ever made was to come to Davidson College,” he said, adding that he cried when he decided to leave early for the N.B.A.“What Davidson stands for lives with me every time I step on the court, and every time I try to impact lives,” he said. “How we represent Davidson in every room we walk into — it matters.”Later, in an interview, he said that his Golden State teammate Draymond Green texted him after the ceremony.“He said, ‘I’ve never seen you smile like that — when you were on that stage,’” Curry said. “I didn’t think people could read through that.”Curry said Davidson “was kind of the beginning of a major evolution in my life, and I have so many memories of every experience, everyone I met, and the support of the community throughout it all. That speaks volumes to why I want to come back, and why yesterday was so special. That’s such a big part of my origin story.” More

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      Once an ‘Easy Way Out’ for Equality, Women’s Soccer Is Now a U.S. Force

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      Brooke Volza and the other girls who play in the top division of high school soccer in Albuquerque know all about the Metro Curse: The team that wins the city’s metro tournament at the start of the season is doomed to end the year without a state championship.So when Cibola High School defied that fate with Volza scoring the only goal in the team’s 1-0 victory against Carlsbad High School before a cheering stadium crowd at the University of New Mexico last year, it was pandemonium. “I started crying. I started hugging everyone,” Volza, 17, said, describing the experience as “times 10 amazing.”Now the ball she used to score that goal sits on a shelf in her bedroom, covered with her teammates’ autographs and jersey numbers. Across it in large capital letters are the words, “2021 STATE CHAMPIONS.”Fifty years ago, Volza’s experience of sprawling and robust competitive high school soccer was effectively unheard-of in the United States. Yet thanks to Title IX, which became law in 1972 and banned sex discrimination in education, generations of girls have had the promise of access to sports and other educational programs.Brooke Volza at Cibola High School in Albuquerque.Adria Malcolm for The New York TimesAsia Lawyer, a rising senior at Centennial High School in Boise, Idaho.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesAnd girls’ soccer, perhaps more than any other women’s sport, has grown tremendously in the 50 years since. School administrators quickly saw adding soccer as a cost-effective way to comply with the law, and the rising interest helped youth leagues swell. Talented players from around the globe came to the United States. And as millions of American women and girls benefited, the best of them gave rise to a U.S. women’s national program that has dominated the world stage.“Once Title IX broke down those barriers, and let women and girls play sports, and said they have to be provided with equal opportunities, the girls came rushing through,” said Neena Chaudhry, the general counsel and senior adviser for education at the National Women’s Law Center. “They came through in droves.”A 50-Year Rise Out of NowhereWomen’s participation in high school and college athletics surged after the passage of Title IX in 1972, and no sport has added more players than soccer.

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      Girls’ Participation in High School Sports
      Notes: Top 15 sports shown. Data is not available for all sports in all years, and comparable data is not available prior to the 1978-79 academic year.Source: National Federation of State High School AssociationsBy The New York Times

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      Women’s Participation in N.C.A.A. Divisions I, II and III
      Notes: Top 15 sports shown. Data is not available for all sports in all years, and comparable data is not available prior to the 1981-82 academic year. Some schools were added to the data in 1995-96.Source: N.C.A.A.By The New York TimesBefore Title IX passed, an N.C.A.A. count found only 13 women’s collegiate soccer teams in the 1971-72 season, with 313 players. In 1974, the first year in which a survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations tracked girls’ participation across the United States, it counted 6,446 girls playing soccer in 321 schools in just seven states, mostly in New York. That number climbed to about 394,100 girls playing soccer in high schools across the country during the 2018-19 school year, with schools often carrying multiple teams and states sponsoring as many as five divisions.Mountain View Los Altos stretching during the tournament in Redmond, the Elite Clubs National League playoffs.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesIn 2018-19, the most recent season counted because of the coronavirus pandemic, there were 3.4 million girls overall participating in high school sports, compared with 4.5 million boys.Many of those athletes have overcome fears to try out for a team. Some have practiced late into the night, running sprints after goofing off with teammates. Some have found archrivals through competition, and plenty have grappled with the sting of defeat. Numerous girls and women on the soccer pitch have felt the thrill of a goal, and the pride of being part of something bigger than themselves.“We are the heart and soul of soccer at Cibola,” Volza said.Title IX is a broad law, and was not originally intended to encompass sports. Its origins lie in fighting discrimination against women and girls in federally funded academic institutions. But as the regulations were hashed out, they eventually encompassed athletics, and it helped bridge disparities beyond the classroom. Today, Title IX is perhaps best known for its legacy within women’s interscholastic athletics.Despite initial and heavy opposition to the law because of a perceived threat to men’s athletic programs, the N.C.A.A. eventually sponsored women’s sports, including soccer in 1982. Before that, only a handful of teams played one another around the country.The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a dynasty that has won 21 N.C.A.A. championships and produced inimitable players including Mia Hamm, began its run playing against high schoolers.“We didn’t really have anyone to play,” said Anson Dorrance, the head coach of the women’s team since its inception in 1979. He described how he cobbled together a schedule that first season. One travel soccer club, the McLean Grasshoppers, “came down to U.N.C. and beat us like a drum,” he said.Florida Gators Coach Samantha Bohon, left, talking with an assistant coach, Jocie Rix, as they scout players during the Elite Clubs National League playoffs.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesThe playoffs are a big showcase for high school players to be seen by top college coaches.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesAfter the N.C.A.A. brought women’s soccer into the fold, participation rates went from 1,855 players on 80 teams across all three divisions in 1982 to nearly 28,000 players across 1,026 teams in 2020-21.Now, the N.C.A.A. claims soccer as the most expanded women’s sports program among universities in the last three decades.Current and former athletic directors, sports administrators and coaches attribute the rise of soccer to several factors. Initially, complying with the law was a game of numbers and dollars: Soccer is a relatively large sport, where average roster sizes typically float between 20 and 26 players. The generous roster sizes helped schools meet the requirements of the law to offer similar numbers of opportunities to male and female students.For administrators, soccer was also economical: It needed only a field, a ball and two goals. It was also a relatively easy sport to learn.“At the time schools were interested in, ‘How can I add sports for women that wouldn’t cost me very much?’” said Donna Lopiano, founder and president of Sports Management Resources and a former chief executive of the Women’s Sports Foundation. She added: “Schools were looking for the easy way out.”The shifts did not begin until the late 1980s and early 1990s. College programs increasingly gained varsity status — often pressured by litigation — which created scholarship opportunities and made soccer a pathway to higher education. The game boomed at the high school level, where it became one of the most popular sports, fourth in terms of participation rates for girls for 2018-19, according to the high school federation (the top three girls’ sports were track and field, volleyball and basketball).An under-14 match in Redmond.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesA cottage industry of club teams also sprang up around the country, as athletes jockeyed for attention from college coaches. The youth game grew, and university teams became a farm system for the elite world stage, as women struggled to play the sport in many countries outside the United States.The U.S. women’s national team went largely unnoticed when it played its first international match in 1985. It also got little attention in 1991 when it won the first Women’s World Cup, held in Guangdong, China.Then the United States began to feel the power of Title IX. In 1996, women’s soccer debuted at the Olympics in Atlanta, and the United States won gold. During the 1999 Women’s World Cup final, against China, the Americans secured a victory during penalty kicks before a capacity crowd of more than 90,000 people at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.Michelle Akers, the pillar of the U.S.W.N.T. in the ’80s and ’90s who is now an assistant coach for the Orlando Pride women’s professional team, said Title IX was “game-changing.” “I can’t even understand the amount of time and energy and heartache that took to get that pushed through, and not just pushing it through but enforcing it — making it real for people, and making it real for me,” she said.The national team’s success continued, with a record four World Cup titles and four Olympic golds. And this year, after a six-year legal battle, a multimillion-dollar settlement and eventual labor agreement established equal pay for players representing the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams when competing internationally.“It was a historic moment, not just for soccer, but for sport,” Cindy Parlow Cone, U.S. Soccer’s president, said.The U.S. women’s national team celebrating its World Cup win in 2019 after a parade in Manhattan.Calla Kessler/The New York TimesSydney Sharts, left, and her sister Hannah, right, are college players. Their mother, Michelle, was on a club team in the ’90s.Alisha Jucevic for The New York TimesIn 1993, Michele Sharts was part of a club team at U.C.L.A. that threatened to sue the school under Title IX for not sponsoring women’s soccer.Sharts, who was cut from the inaugural varsity squad, now has two daughters playing at large university programs. Hannah, 22, started at U.C.L.A. before transferring to Colorado, where she is a graduate student. Sydney, 20, began at Oklahoma before transferring to Kansas State for the coming season.Hannah Sharts has played in front of as many as 5,000 fans. “Being able to gradually see more and more fans fill up the stands throughout my college experience has been very promising,” Hannah Sharts said. Both Hannah and Sydney have dreams to play professionally.Like the Sharts sisters, Volza, the rising senior in New Mexico, plans to play in college. She is looking at Division II and III schools with strong engineering programs.But first, she has her final year of high school ahead. Volza said she wanted to be a leader for the younger players.“I want to motivate them and teach them what it’s like to play varsity soccer for a state-winning championship team,” Volza said.And Volza wants to make history again in her own corner of America, by leading her team to win the Metro tournament and state championship in back-to-back years.Members of the De Anza Force celebrating a win over World Class F.C. in Redmond.Lindsey Wasson for The New York Times More

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      Why College Basketball Teams Are Turning to Alumni to Find Coaches

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      Coaches of several N.C.A.A. tournament teams either attended their universities, like North Carolina’s Hubert Davis, or started their careers there, like Kansas’ Bill Self.NEW ORLEANS — Just before his senior season at Oklahoma State, Bill Self injured a knee while working as a basketball camp counselor at the University of Kansas. Each time he saw Larry Brown, who was then the Jayhawks’ coach, the limp got worse.Brown felt so badly for Self that when the camp ended he told Self that if there was ever anything he needed, he had only to ask. So Self did.“I said ‘I want to be your graduate assistant next year,’” Self said. “And he said, ‘You’re hired.’”It was not much of a job. Self read USA Today and passed along any articles he thought might interest his boss. He made sure a lane was reserved at a local bowling alley on game days, in case Brown wanted to blow off steam. And, mostly, he stayed out of the way.But during that year, Self built relationships — with an assistant athletic director, with a publicist, with the basketball secretary — and maintained them well enough that when Kansas’ head coaching job opened 17 years later, he had a small army of fans within the athletic department.“That probably played a role in me being able to come back here,” Self said.Taking advantage of those early connections hardly makes Self an outlier in college basketball, where it is increasingly common for former students, team managers, players and low-level assistants to have triumphant homecomings as head basketball coaches.Just look at the Final Four, where Self is joined by Villanova Coach Jay Wright, who caught the eye of Rollie Massimino when he worked his camps and returned to the Wildcats after building Hofstra into a N.C.A.A. tournament team. There’s also North Carolina’s Hubert Davis, who starred for the Tar Heels from 1988-92, then returned to Chapel Hill as an assistant after a lengthy N.B.A. career and dabbling in broadcasting. The other team here, Duke, will be coached next season by Jon Scheyer, a former captain of a national championship team and a current assistant who will succeed the retiring Mike Krzyzewski.Jon Scheyer, right, a captain on a Duke national championship team, will lead the Blue Devils after Mike Krzyzewski retires.Kevin C. Cox/Getty ImagesSimilar stories have dotted the entire bracket.Texas Tech’s Mark Adams, a 65-year-old basketball lifer, and Michigan’s Juwan Howard, a member of the fabled Fab Five who went on to have a decorated N.B.A. career, took their teams into the second weekend of the tournament with one thing in common: They were doing it at their alma maters.In all, 14 of the tournament’s 68 coaches were working at schools they either attended or began their coaching careers at. And the trend shows no sign of abating: Shaheen Holloway, the architect of St. Peter’s miraculous run to the East regional final this year, was hired on Wednesday by Seton Hall, the university where he starred as a slick point guard and later spent eight years as an assistant coach.Louisville, which has not won an N.C.A.A. tournament game since 2017, turned to Kenny Payne — a Knicks assistant and a reserve on Louisville’s 1986 title-winning team — to reverse the Cardinals’ fortunes. And at least six other people are taking over as head coaches at schools where they either played or served as an assistant.“I find myself watching the coaching carousel in all the sports, asking, ‘What’s their tie to the institution? Have they gone there before?’” said Nina King, the athletic director at Duke. “I think it’s something that we look at.”King said that while coaches who had no connection to Duke were discussed as Krzyzewski’s replacement, it was important to turn to someone from “the brotherhood,” where there was no shortage of possibilities, including the college coaches Bobby Hurley (Arizona State), Tommy Amaker (Harvard), Johnny Dawkins (Central Florida), Jeff Capel (Pittsburgh), Chris Collins (Northwestern), Kenny Blakeney (Howard) and Steve Wojciechowski (formerly of Marquette), or Quin Snyder of the Utah Jazz.Ultimately, Krzyzewski put his considerable thumb on the scale for Scheyer, who has continued to gain commitments from top recruits.“To be able to sit in a kid’s living room recruiting him and say ‘I’ve lived this — come throw in with me because I’ve lived Duke for X number of years,’ I think it’s important,” King said.Kenny Payne won a national title with Louisville as a player and left his job with the Knicks to try to revitalize the program.Timothy D. Easley/Associated PressAn increasing number of coaches can pitch more than a familial tie: They can cite N.B.A. experience. Often, though, that pro experience has not translated to the college game, where having connections to youth basketball power brokers are essential to recruiting elite talent. The job also requires glad-handing boosters and, more recently, navigating the transfer portal, duties that aren’t part of the N.B.A. ecosystem.It’s why former N.B.A. players like Clyde Drexler (Houston), Chris Mullin (St. John’s), Eddie Jordan (Rutgers) and Kevin Ollie (Connecticut) did not have enduring success at their alma maters, though Ollie did win a national championship before fizzling. And it is why Patrick Ewing has struggled at Georgetown, where his team lost its final 21 games this season.“Most of the guys that have been in the N.B.A., they’ve made so much money, they didn’t really care that much about coaching,” said Roy Williams, who retired last year as North Carolina’s coach after winning three national titles and cheered on Davis in Philadelphia last weekend.The Final Four in the Men’s and Women’s TournamentsCard 1 of 5The national semifinals. More