In 2011, when Brian Gregory was hired as Georgia Tech’s men’s basketball coach, he inherited a team that had just suffered its third losing season in four years. But the coach’s most pressing issue had nothing to do with the team’s on-court performance: Poor scores on the NCAA’s annual academic progress rate were threatening to dig an even deeper hole for the program. Tech had lost three scholarships in previous years and was in jeopardy of being slapped with additional sanctions.
“It was a big concern of ours when [Gregory] got hired,” says Ryan Bamford, Tech’s associate athletic director for internal operations. “A school like Georgia Tech, you don’t want to be underperforming in academics.”
The NCAA’s academic progress rate, or APR, is a formula that quantifies each sports program’s success to ensure athletes maintain a grade point average of at least 2.6. The maximum APR score is 1000, with 952 being the national average; teams must maintain a 900 four-year APR or a 930 two-year average to be eligible for NCAA postseason play. When Gregory took over, Tech’s men’s basketball APR was 915.
Gregory first helped his departing senior class improve their grades and graduate on time. As a result, Tech earned a perfect APR score of 1000 for that year.
Gregory’s involvement in academics is “above and beyond” the efforts of most other college-level coaches, says Whitney Burton, a senior academic coordinator for the team. The two meet weekly to go over each player’s homework, grades and progress in each class. The coach then helps Burton and other support staff create individualized plans for the upcoming week, including study hall hours and tutoring sessions.
“He is very hands-on,” Burton says. “He knows when guys have tests, and he’ll text them and say, ‘Hey, how was your math test today?’”
Gregory says his commitment to academics stems from being raised by a school principal and a guidance counselor, and from his experiences as an assistant coach at Northwestern and Michigan State. By the time he took his first head-coaching job at Dayton in 2003, Gregory had cultivated a philosophy that targeted success not just in terms of wins, but also in the classroom and at the community level.
“I don’t believe in the smorgasbord approach of picking and choosing what you’re going to do well,” Gregory says. “I’m a strong believer that if a guy isn’t doing well in school … that’s going to affect him as a basketball player. And the same thing the other way around.”
This holistic approach paid dividends over Gregory’s eight seasons at Dayton, where his team won 65 percent of its games and never scored less than 974 on its four-year APR. But implementing that blueprint at Tech required a different approach to recruiting.
“[Tech’s] recruiting pool is not the same as other schools,” Gregory says. “Do people that are important to [a prospective recruit] emphasize the academic piece? Can he handle the academic workload at Georgia Tech, and has he proven that in his time as a high school student? When those match up with the on-court product, then we have a strong candidate.”
Sophomore Marcus Georges-Hunt fit this profile. One of the team’s leading scorers this season, he came from a home where good grades were a prerequisite to playing basketball; along with fellow second-year Chris Bolden, he was honored last spring by being named to the All-ACC Academic team. Georges-Hunt thinks the team’s strong relationship with its academic coordinators creates an environment where players are challenged to succeed in the classroom. “If I have questions, they have answers. If I don’t understand something, they push me to figure it out,” he says. “They stay on top of us, push our team to get our work done.”
The results of this culture change have been dramatic: In each of Gregory’s first two seasons, the men’s basketball team has earned single-year scores of 1000, elevating Tech’s four-year score, once worst in the ACC, into the top half of the conference. When APR scores for the 2012-13 school year are published in summer 2014, the team expects another perfect 1000.
“I really don’t worry about the multi-year score anymore,” Bamford says. “I know we’re going to be fine.”
Gregory says that while graduation rates and GPAs get all of the attention, it’s the day-to-day routines and habits that most determine success. “I hardly ever talk about grades,” Gregory says. “I talk about the effort they’re putting in on a daily basis. Going to class. Taking notes. Study halls and tutoring. If you take care of that stuff, then you’re going to do well enough that you’re going to earn your degree.”
Twitter
Pingback: Moving Moving, and Some Links