What's So Special About NMH Basketball?

When the Harvard and Dartmouth men’s basketball teams met on Jan. 7 in Cambridge, Mass., six Northfield Mount Hermon alumni suited up to play.

 

In the past four years, NMH has sent 12 graduates of its boys’ basketball program to Ivy League teams—a statistic no other high school in the country can claim—and, in all, 24 players to NCAA Division 1 teams. For the 2011–12 season, NMH not only has three players at Harvard and three at Dartmouth, but also two at Brown; one each at Cornell, Columbia, and Yale; and others at Louisville, Seton Hall, Pepperdine, American, and Bucknell.

 

That’s not even counting post-college ventures. Recently, seven NMH basketball alumni have gone on to play professionally in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Macedonia, and Honduras. Others coach high-performing teams: Alex Popp ’04 is the assistant coach at Middlebury College, which in December was ranked the top Division III team in the country.

 

So what’s so special about NMH basketball? What keeps the NMH gym filled with college coaches? What carried NMH to the prep school national championship in 2010 and has kept it in the top five in the country for the past three years and top 10 for nine years?

 

According to head coach John Carroll ’89, it’s the culture of the school. NMH attracts highly motivated students who want to achieve greatness, he says. Faculty and staff hold them to higher standards, challenge them constantly, and provide extensive support. Case in point: power forward Evan Cummins ’12, who says that when he arrived at NMH, he was, like many of his classmates, immature, ambitious, and eager to learn. “I was still defining myself as both a student and an athlete,” says Cummins, who will enroll at Harvard next fall. “Now I’m a much more confident and independent person.”

 

When Carroll began building the program in 2001, he found a role model in Sheila Heffernon, chair of NMH’s performing arts department and director of NMH’s choral programs. “She gets these great kids who achieve academic success and also are phenomenal at their artistic passions,” he says. “Plus, they matriculate to great colleges.”

 

Attracting and enrolling top-tier student-athletes is the first part of Carroll’s process. On campus, the real work begins. He greets each student with the same message: “Forget your goals. We don’t work for goals here. What are your dreams?” Carroll asks his players to write down their aspirations and chase them. Tony Gaffney ’04 dreamed of playing in the NBA and he did, with the Boston Celtics. Ty Nash ’07 dreamed of captaining a Big East team, and he did, at the University of Notre Dame. Matt Brown ’10 dreamed of attending Harvard; he’s currently a sophomore there, playing football as well as basketball.

 

Carroll constantly looks for ways to improve the basketball program. He builds relationships with college coaches to understand what they look for in their players. At the end of every college basketball season, he contacts NMH alumni who’ve just finished their freshman year of play to find out what they felt unprepared for. This helps Carroll better groom the next group of NMH seniors for their transition to college—so it’s “less of a culture shock,” Evan Cummins says—while also keeping alumni connected to NMH.

 

Part of that connection comes from the closeness and camaraderie that Cummins says is a big part of each year’s team. “We end every practice and game together by saying the word ‘family,’” he says. “I think that is something that really holds true.”