Freshman Athlete Quotes

Galen Rupp matriculated as a freshman at the University of Oregon in 2004 and was performing well. There was only one problem—Salazar didn’t have any faith that the head track-and-field coach was the right collegiate mentor for his young protégé. So Salazar and Cook helped orchestrate the firing of coach Martin Smith, a quirky leader who many of the Nike loyalists didn’t think was the right fit for Rupp. In this effort they came to loggerheads with Bill Moos, the university’s athletic director. Knight and Nike had had a long and mutually prosperous twelve-year run with Moos in which the school’s athletic budget grew from $18.5 million to $41 million. But he didn’t want to fire his head coach, who was objectively good at his job. Knight threatened to withhold funding for the construction of the school’s new basketball arena until both coach and director were gone. Less than a week after he led the team to a sixth-place finish at the NCAA indoor championships, Smith was replaced by former Stanford coach Vin Lananna, a devout “Nike guy.” Moos would retire a year later, saying, “I created the monster that ate me.” Knight then made a donation of $100 million—the largest donation in Oregon history—to the university.

From kindergarten through senior year of high school, Evan attended Crossroads, an elite, coed private school in Santa Monica known for its progressive attitudes. Tuition at Crossroads runs north of $ 22,000 a year, and seemingly rises annually. Students address teachers by their first names, and classrooms are named after important historical figures, like Albert Einstein and George Mead, rather than numbered. The school devotes as significant a chunk of time to math and history as to Human Development, a curriculum meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence. Crossroads emphasizes creativity, personal communication, well-being, mental health, and the liberal arts. The school focuses on the arts much more than athletics; some of the school’s varsity games have fewer than a dozen spectators. 2 In 2005, when Evan was a high school freshman, Vanity Fair ran an exhaustive feature about the school titled “School for Cool.” 3 The school, named for Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” unsurprisingly attracts a large contingent of Hollywood types, counting among its alumni Emily and Zooey Deschanel, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Michael Bay, Maya Rudolph, and Spencer Pratt. And that’s just the alumni—the parents of students fill out another page or two of who’s who A-listers. Actor Denzel Washington once served as the assistant eighth grade basketball coach, screenwriter Robert Towne spoke in a film class, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma talked shop with the school’s chamber orchestra.

invitation of the New York Athletic Club to use its training facilities, in a nearby suburb on Long Island Sound, and quickly slipped out of Princeton. As the boys—now officially the U.S. eight-oared Olympic rowing team—settled in at Travers Island they were, largely unbeknownst to them, beginning to become national celebrities. Back home in Seattle, they were already full-blown superstars. Eastern coaches and sportswriters had been following them with increasing interest ever since their freshman victory at

Michael walked away from his freshman season wondering what that had all been about. And then, strangely, the honors began to roll in. He was named a First Team Freshman All-American, and First Team Freshman All-SEC. He was named pre-season All-SEC by magazines and also by the SEC’s coaches. College Football Weekly listed him the best player on the Ole Miss offense. His value, once perceived, was indestructible. He could play on one of the worst football offenses in the nation and nobody would hold it against him. The experience had been a blur. But all anyone seemed to care about was that (a) he was still the biggest guy on the field and a freakishly gifted athlete, (b) he’d picked up the college game faster than anyone had the right to expect, and (c) when he knew what he was supposed to do, he’d knocked some folks around. And while that wasn’t as often as anyone would have liked, it had been often enough that players and coaches now knew he’d eventually figure it out.