Freshman Takes on Football, Basketball

While most Harvard men’s basketball players have spent the preseason working on ball handling and perfecting their jump shots, freshman point guard Matt Brown has been enduring a different kind of preseason workout. Instead of setting screens and throwing bounce passes in pickup games, Brown has been running passing routes and catching footballs as a wide receiver on the Crimson’s football team.

Brown—the first basketball recruit from the class of 2014 to commit to play for head coach Tommy Amaker—decided last month that one sport just wasn’t enough. So the heavily recruited high school football and basketball player decided to join the football team, making him Harvard’s lone male two-sport athlete.

“I think I’m capable of playing both,” Brown said. “Not too many people have the ability or the opportunity, so I thought, ‘Why not give it a shot?’”

At Northfield Mount Herman in western Massachusetts, Brown had little trouble balancing the two sports. As a high school senior, Brown spearheaded his football team’s offense as the starting running back while also running the point on the school’s nationally recognized basketball team.

When it came to picking a college, Brown’s options included offers from Notre Dame and Boston College to play football, and he was hearing from Providence and Stanford about basketball.

While most high school athletes in Brown’s shoes choose only one sport to focus on in college, Brown had different ideas.

“Playing two sports in college was always sort of in the back of my mind,” Brown said. “So when I was looking at schools, I always thought, ‘Would that be a place where I would have an opportunity to play both?’”

At most schools, the answer was ‘No.’ Even if coaches told Brown he would have the opportunity to play both, Brown suspected it was just a ploy to get him to commit.

“Some of [the ACC, Big East, and Pac-10] schools said that they would give me the option, but honestly I didn’t really believe them,” Brown said. “When the [Crimson] basketball program first started recruiting me, my dad and I had a conversation with Amaker and asked if I would have the opportunity to play both. And he said, ‘I’ll give you a shot. I’ll let you try it out.’”

One year after Brown committed to the Harvard basketball program following his junior year of high school, Amaker stayed true to his word.

Throughout the summer, Brown vacillated between whether or not he should play both sports, weighing the pros—getting a chance to continue with a sport he enjoys playing—and cons—missing basketball preseason and risking injury. In early August, Brown decided the opportunity to suit up his football pads for at least one more year was too much to pass up.

Following a couple of conversations with Amaker and head football coach Tim Murphy, Brown, after spending the majority of his summer on the hardwood, found himself on the gridiron, running routes and catching passes. With the Crimson’s football opener less than two weeks away, Brown is still trying to make the transition into a collegiate wide receiver. The athleticism is already there. At 6’3, 205 pounds, Brown is not only one of the biggest wide receivers on the Harvard’s roster but also one of the quickest.

“He’s been doing really well with picking stuff up and letting his athletic ability shine through,” said senior wide receiver Marco Iannuzzi. “At the top of the route, we have lots of options. Those kind of cater to him really well because he can give a juke and get past his defender.”

But before Brown sees much playing time on the Crimson’s deep wide receiving corps, he still has much to work on—namely, learning Harvard’s expansive offense.

Brown should have the playbook down pat by Nov. 20, the last day of the football season. Brown plans on finishing up the season with the football team, then transitioning to the basketball squad, which plays its first game on Nov. 13.

While Brown will miss most of the basketball preseason and will likely miss the Crimson’s first three basketball games, he still plans to put himself through individual basketball workouts in the fall.

“It’s not like I’m not going to touch a basketball until I go to practice,” Brown said. “I’m going to be as much a part of both teams as possible.”

—Staff writer Martin Kessler can be reached at martin.kessler@college.harvard.edu.