In This Corner

PASADENA -– They made the movie.

“Quantum Hoops,” it’s called, and it came out last fall to warm and fuzzy reviews.

Yeah, we get it. Caltech basketball is cute and cuddly, gutsy and inspiring.

All those boy geniuses scratching out time between astrophysics and thermodynamics classes to play a little round ball. IQ titans, hoops tyros.

Accurate. Charming.

Old.

Caltech hasn’t won a conference men’s basketball game in 23 years.

That’s enough.

Caltech has lost 273 consecutive Southern California Interscholastic Athletic Conference games.

That’s more than enough.

Perhaps the best Caltech team in two decades completed its season Tuesday night. It gave Whittier a scare, leading 25-22 in the second half before fading to a 72-60 defeat in a nearly packed gym.

And the beatings go on, another 0-14 SCIAC season in the books, and perhaps more to come if Caltech doesn’t do a little something to help itself.

We’re not talking about the players or coach Roy Dow. The former give all they can in an academic climate so rigorous most of us can’t even fathom it. The latter recruits every kid who can walk and compute cube roots at the same time.

They have produced results. To a point.

Caltech basketball no longer is a joke. Ask Redlands, which needed overtime to fight off the Beavers, 97-88. Check with La Verne, also pushed to overtime before escaping Braun Center, 80-74. Or Whittier,
whose 86-84 OT victory over Caltech in 2006 was the was the nerve-racking climax of “Quantum Hoops.”

“That hopelessness they had seven, eight, nine years ago isn’t here anymore,” Whittier coach Rock Carter said. “Every team in our league prepares for Caltech now.”

Most of that is about Dow identifying math and science whizzes who actually played high school basketball. Maybe even started.

“Not league MVPs,” Dow said. “Guys who played.”

That gives you a chance, in the SCIAC, which never will be confused with the Pac-10. The SCIAC is a eight Division III schools with high academic standards and below-the-rim basketball programs.

Though none of the other seven have standards as rigorous as does Caltech.

And none seems so coldly resistant to allowing qualified kids -– who happen to play basketball –- into the school.

Three seniors played their last game Tuesday. They were among four “basketball” players allowed into the Class of 2008. But only two basketball players got past admissions in the Class of 2009. Zero made it for 2010. And only one for the 2011 class.

Paxon Frady, a senior guard from Georgia who will pursue a PhD in neuroscience, conceded to “frustration” as he completed his basketball career, and he said it may not change for upcoming Caltech teams.

“Not unless the administration starts recruiting some basketball players,” he said. “It’s not like players who could play for us aren’t qualified to go to school here. There’s this big pool of people who are all about the same and it’s kind of random who gets in.”

Said star center Bryan Hires: “As you can see, we’ve hit a spot where we have a lack of talent, with guys with experience. There’s a handful of guys out there that Coach (Dow) recruits that have all the test scores, all the extra-curriculars that your average Caltech person has but for some odd reason they don’t get accepted. That’s the most frustrating part of this because they are just as qualified. That is the one thing that can definitely put us over the top.”

Dow knows he works at a school that is academics first, second, third ... and forever.

But he suggests that elite institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams and Amherst manage to find some athletes among eggheads -– with no apparent harm done to the schools’ academic
reputation.

MIT, Caltech’s East Coast doppelganger, has won 11 games this season.

Caltech has won two (non-conference) games since 1996, one this season (Gallaudet) and last (Bard). “First time in school history we’ve beaten an NCAA school in consecutive years,” Dow noted.

But those were baby steps, and didn’t come against Caltech’s traditional SCIAC rivals. An issue that calls for redress.

It is only fair that if a school is going to field teams in sports as popular and competitive as basketball that it should allow those teams a chance of success.

Caltech has not done that. It could. It should.

It would be this easy: Take Dow’s recruiting list and enroll, say, two per year into the 220-some-person freshman class. Two.

Two guys who already have played and practiced basketball. But who also can handle all that being a Caltech student is about. Fill around them with the genius hobbyists. But let Dow have a nucleus.
Give the guys a chance.

Winning SCIAC games isn’t everything. But it’s something ... something Caltech players and coaches and students should taste at least once in their academic careers.

Caltech is all about solving knotty problems. It’s time to fix this one.