Blue White Illustrated

Searching for that elusive hardwood holy grail ob Knight, Mike Krzyzewski, Rick Pitino… They're among the most famous coaches in college basketball history and all are in the Naismith Memorial Basket- ball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. None of the 12 men who have served as head coach of the Penn State men's bas- ketball team since 1916 are even close to that elite status. Knight, Krzyzewski and/or Pitino could have been among those Nittany Lion head coaches had one or two of them been hired by Penn State when they were being considered for the posi- tion years ago. Add Chuck Daly, another Hall of Fame coach who made his name in the NBA, and Jim Valvano, who won an NCAA championship at North Carolina State, and one has to wonder what Penn State's much-maligned men's basketball pro- gram would be like today if any one of the five had migrated to University Park back in the day. Yet, one also wonders if they, too, would have left Penn State as failures – casualties of the peculiar circumstances that have plagued Nittany Lion basket- ball for decades. At the center of it all is recruiting – the player talent that is the pathway to ultimate success. Penn State has had only one bona fide first-team All-American in its history, and Jesse Arnelle played 60 years ago, although a handful of former players have gone on to play in the NBA. As the 2015-16 season draws to a close, Penn State's incoming recruiting class is being labeled as the best in its history, ranked 18th nationally by Rivals.com af- ter the early-signing period this past November and featuring three stars from the fertile Philadelphia area. They'll join at least three other "Philly guys" on the current squad, including one from the highly regarded 2015 recruiting class who was rated among the 150 best play- ers in the country. Getting players from Philadelphia to matriculate at Penn State has been the elusive holy grail for Nittany Lion basketball, the experts have repeatedly proclaimed. Perhaps. When analyzing Penn State men's bas- ketball and its perennial foundering on the national stage, you can almost forget about everything before 1950 except the 1941-42 Lions of underrated coach John Lawther. That '42 team was the best in school history up to that time, finishing the regular season with a 17-2 record and a spot in the NCAA tournament, which was just four years old. However, the NCAA tourney was radi- cally different then. Only eight teams participated, and it was quite an accom- plishment for Lawther and his Lions to be in the four-team Eastern Regional bracket. They lost to Dartmouth, 44-39, but beat Illinois, 41-34, for third place. However, the National Invitation Tournament, which had started one year before the NCAA event, had more pres- tige from its beginning in 1938 until the early 1960s. At its zenith in the 1940s and '50s, the nation's best teams often passed up the NCAA tournament to play in the NIT at Madison Square Garden or participated in both events. What also marks 1950 as the pivotal moment for Penn State is that the school's first scholarship basketball player, Herm Sledzik, was a sophomore on the 1950-51 team. Decades earlier, Penn State athletes had received full scholarships, but the aid wasn't tied to participation in a specific sport, and the recipients usually competed in multiple sports throughout the school year. In 1928, Penn State banned all athletic scholarships in a major de-emphasis of all sports, especially football, which even at that time was the college's most important sport and its biggest money- maker. Twenty years later, the Penn State board of trustees began re-implement- ing financial aid, starting with tuition in 1949 and adding room and board in 1950. Football received the bulk of the scholarships, which officially became known as "grants-in-aid." Starting in 1949 with 100 tuition-only subsidies for all sports, the funding increased by Jan- uary 1951 to 150 tuition grants, with 50 to include room and board (informally called scholarships) – 45 designated for football. B

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