Asian Americans remain rare in men's college basketball

Asian Americans remain rare in men's college basketball
Bryan Chu, Special to The Chronicle

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

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(12-15) 21:03 PST -- Jeremy Lin has seen it and heard it.

Too short. Too skinny. Picked last. Asian.

Those tags stick to Lin wherever he goes, even as the starting point guard for Harvard's basketball team.

"It's a sport for white and black people," Lin said. "You don't get respect for being an Asian American basketball player in the U.S."

Although the game is brimming in popularity among Asian American youth - there are Asian leagues, club teams like the San Jose Ninjas and San Jose Zebras, and packed courts outside schools, churches and temples - Lin practically is alone.

Of 4,814 Division I men's basketball players in 2006-07, there were 19 Asian Americans (including Pacific Islanders and ethnically mixed), according to the most recent NCAA Student-Athlete Race and Ethnicity Report. That's 0.4 percent.

Players, coaches and sociologists cite stereotypes and cultural factors as reasons that percentage might not rise very much in the foreseeable future. At the same time, there are players and coaches making inroads to mainstream, high-profile basketball, and there's a feeling of pioneer spirit among them.

"Especially now that there are lots of Asian Americans growing up and playing, I have to try to hold my own in college," Lin said. "It's definitely motivational and it gives me a chip on my shoulder."

Lin, who leads the Crimson (4-4) in points, steals and assists and is second in rebounds, is one of the best Asian American basketball players to come from the Bay Area.

After Palo Alto High won the Division II state title in 2006, Lin's senior season, he was named first-team All-State and Northern California Division II Player of the Year. He was The Chronicle's Metro Player of the Year. Considering those honors and his senior stats - 15.1 points, 7.1 assists, 6.2 rebounds and five steals - Lin thought he'd get at least a few Division I scholarship offers.

He got none.

"I'm not saying top-5 state automatically gets you offers," Lin said, "but I do think (my ethnicity) did affect the way coaches recruited me. I think if I were a different race, I would've been treated differently."

At Harvard, the 6-foot-3 junior has faced harsh conditions on the road.

"I hear everything: 'Go back to China. Orchestra is on the other side of campus. Open up your eyes,' " Lin said. "They're yelling at me before, during and after. I'm an easy target because I'm Asian. Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable, but it's part of the game."

Kelvin Kim, who transferred from UCLA and now is the starting point guard for UC San Diego, sees it in his everyday encounters with classmates.

"No one expects me to be a basketball player," said Kim, who is from Lake Forest (Orange County).

Kirk Kim went to Salesian High in Richmond and walked on at Cal in the late '90s. He said, "Automatically, playing - especially in the inner city - you get no respect being Asian."

Thin coaching ranks
Coaches face similar hurdles.

Seattle Pacific's Jeff Hironaka is considered the only current Asian American Division II head coach. He has 28 years of coaching experience and an 121-59 record in six-plus seasons as the Falcons' head coach. As an assistant, he helped them to at least a share of six conference championships and a national semifinal appearance in 2000.

Hironaka has interviewed in vain for Division I jobs.

"I was told they needed to hire an African American, and another school said they needed to hire a Caucasian," Hironaka said. "I'm not one or the other, so then I'm out.

"I understand assistant coaches you have to recruit - most (players) are Caucasian - so they ask, 'What can you help us do? Recruit Asians?' "

Hironaka continued: "You don't want to call it discrimination, but it's a discrimination kind of scenario. Sometimes you have to accept the reality of it. It's a tough barrier to crack."

Rex Walters, now in his first season as head coach at USF, is considered the only Asian American Division I men's basketball head coach. On his staff is assistant coach Danny Yoshikawa, a Japanese American who was conference player of the year at UC Davis in 1996.

"We've slowly, steadily grown," said Yoshikawa of Asian Americans breaking into the game. "I would've never seen two (Asian Americans) at USF. I just think that those kinds of things just take place over time.

"It's more getting to the point where people are going to hire guys - maybe it's because they're getting over the stigmas - because they are doing a good job."

One case in point is the Miami Heat's Erik Spoelstra. Spoelstra, who played at the University of Portland, this year became the first Filipino American head coach in the NBA.

Though Lin and Kelvin Kim are starting in college, getting to the NBA is a longshot for almost everyone. Given the tiny pool of Asian Americans in the college game, the chance of a player making it to the top is small indeed.

Walters was a rare exception.

A standout at Kansas, Walters, who is hapa (his mother, Yoko, is Japanese and his father, Monte, is Caucasian), was taken 16th in the 1993 NBA draft, one of the first Asian Americans to make it to the pros. He spent eight seasons in the league.

Walters not optimistic
Now, from his point of view as a recruiter, Walters thinks youth trends are reducing the crop of potential Asian American players.

"I wanted to be a basketball player and I invested all my time into that," Walters said. "It's a totally different thinking now. You see kids spending time playing PlayStation 3 and that's time lost in the gym.

"When I was growing up, there were lots of good Asian American basketball players. I haven't seen those same types (while recruiting)."

Some other recent examples of Asian Americans in basketball: Blake Wallace is a junior forward at USF; Bobby Nash, a swingman at Hawaii last season, signed with the Shiga Lakestars of Basketball Japan; and Derrick Low, the former Washington State guard, signed with the Sydney Spirit in Australia's National Basketball League.

Wallace and Nash are both 6-6, two examples that contradict stature stereotypes. And one prominent coach sees the mixing of all races as a factor in the future of Asian American players.

"Society has come to be interracial marriages, and because of that, you're seeing (Asian Americans) that are bigger and stronger," said Darren Matsubara, basketball consultant for adidas basketball and coach for the EBO/2K Sports AAU team. "There are going to be more players coming up now."

However, the number of Asian Americans on prominent teams remains disproportionately low.

In the NCAA's eight-year ethnic-background survey, the smallest total of Asian Americans in Division I men's basketball was 10 (2003-04) and the largest was 27 (2005-06).

Family priorities
"I do think it's startling," said Jere Takahashi, a sociologist in Asian American Studies at Cal. "At the same time, I found talking to student-athletes ... (that) families don't emphasize sports; they put emphasis on academics.

"Whether coming from an immigrant family or a family of three or four generations, (schoolwork) becomes the interest of parents."

Professor Henry Yu, who taught Asian American studies at UCLA for 14 years and is now at the University of British Columbia, said people often categorize Asians as being too short as the reason why there aren't more players in the game. That's not the case.

Yu offers two factors why the odds are against Asian Americans.

The first is Asian American families putting pressure on young males to earn a paycheck, which is very difficult to do as an athlete.

"There's a reason why the Asian athletes are coming from overseas," Yu said. "If you're growing up in North America, there are family values and pressures to become a good husband. There's a sense of family ideology, and dreaming to be a professional athlete is not a good idea. It's frowned upon."

The second factor is the difficulty for Asian Americans to break into established sports networks like into the AAU web, college programs and the coaching scene.

"Those networks are very strong and often are racial," Yu said. "That's why it's so hard for blacks to get into coaching.

"That force has slowed down African Americans and Latinos up until 30 years ago. Hispanic players are now the largest minority playing baseball. It took a lot for the dam to break, but I don't see it breaking for Asian Americans."

Matsubara, who played at Cal State Northridge, says players are fighting themselves.

"It really starts with the mind," Matsubara said. "Most Asian basketball players are defeated before they start. There's the stereotype that Asians don't play ball. Then you have people in the community being negative toward you ... so then you begin to think, 'Why pursue this?'

"In Asian basketball, if an individual can understand and accept going outside the box, then you'll start to see more players."

Yet Matsubara said in the 15 years he has been scouting players that it seems Asian Americans "have been discouraged and given up."

Lin and Kelvin Kim are in the position of being role models.

"(People) come up to me and let me know how much they look up to me and they ask me for advice," Kim said. "It makes me feel motivated that they're looking up to me, and the fact that I can be, like, that light to them basketball-wise, it motivates me to want to do that and be as successful as possible.

"I've had people from Korea hit me up on Facebook who were trying to play basketball, and people from Canada."

When it comes to role models, Lin and Kelvin Kim do look up to the NBA players from China, the Rockets' Yao Ming and the Nets' Yi Jianlian. Lin and Kim each wants to leave his own mark.

"I'm on my own mission, and there aren't many people who can relate to me," Lin said. "(My parents) try to tell me to plan ahead and they tell me basketball isn't going to feed you for the rest of your life.

"But I feel like I have something to prove to everyone out there. In a sense, I'm trying to represent Asian Americans on the basketball court and I'm trying to be the best player and reach my potential."

By the numbers
Number of Asian Americans in NCAA men's college basketball, according to the NCAA:

Year DI DII DIII
1999-00 15 17 45
2000-01 12 18 54
2001-02 11 19 48
2002-03 11 20 54
2003-04 10 27 53
2004-05 20 31 46
2005-06 27 27 61
2006-07 19 35 38

Meanwhile:


From 1999 to 2007, the number of Asian American Division I women's basketball players has gone up in six years. In 2005-06, there were 76, the most ever recorded.

Bryan Chu, a former Chronicle staff writer, is on staff at the San Antonio Express-News. E-mail comments on this article to letterstogreen@sfchronicle.com.

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