Winning Isn’t Anything:

Caltech’s men’s basketball team cracks a 22-year losing streak…

By Carl Kozlowski

Caltech may be known for excellence in many fields: biology, chemistry, engineering, math… the list goes on. Unfortunately, athletics does not appear on that list.

In fact, the Caltech Beavers basketball team has racked up the longest losing streak in NCAA history with a staggering string of 207 conference-game losses dating back 22 seasons.

But far from getting down on themselves about their abysmal win/loss record, Beaver team members and their coach have remained remarkably upbeat, so much so that Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly dropped in a couple years ago to write a funny yet inspirational  essay about the team.

Then, on Jan. 6, the team did what many thought impossible – they won a game, beating New York’s Bard College by an impressive 81-52 margin. The result was a media firestorm that found the Beavers mentioned in 130 print and television profiles from news outlets around the globe.

Maybe not so ironically, a decade ago Sports Illustrated had voted Bard the worst college team in the country. Reilly was thrilled just the same.

“I'm so happy for those kids. I think they do something like eight hours of homework a day, so for them to take time out so that Caltech can even have a basketball team is totally cool,” Reilly said in a recent interview. “I hope this doesn't go to their heads and that they don't start skipping class to go to practices. We need scientists and math brains, but jump shooters we’ve got plenty of.”

Quantum Hoops

The story doesn’t end there, primarily because the season is far from over. The now-emboldened Beavers still had to suit up and play again just four nights later. And even though the players might have breathed a sigh of relief over finally winning, their coach still knew that starting another losing streak was going to be far more likely than starting a winning one.

“You’re congratulating me, but really, for what? We’re still 1 and 207,” Beavers Coach Roy Dow commented sardonically in response to a congratulatory phone call after the team’s win against Bard. “And we’ll likely have our butts handed to us on a platter Wednesday night when we play Occidental. We’ll be lucky if we lose by less than 40 points. Everyone outmatches us in size, speed and athletic ability. Everyone.”

“The streak captures your imagination, but it didn’t take me more than two days to see these guys are really special. There’s so much more to the team, the school and the coach,” said Rick Greenwald, director of a new documentary about the team called Quantum Hoops.

“Dow only has six players with high school varsity experience and has more players who were valedictorians of their high schools than played basketball on a team,” Greenwald said.

Greenwald was speaking from the Occidental bleachers, where he had come to simply watch and cheer on the Beavers without his camera in tow. As the clock wound down and the Beavers started a new losing streak, the director noted what he found special about the team.

“The fact that they don’t quit -- that nobody quits in the middle of a season -- is remarkable,” Greenwald observed. “You have to imagine the odds of kids giving up their free time at a school where there is no free time.”

Indeed, Caltech is far from your typical American college. It does not have a Greek system or a social culture built around sex, booze and rock and roll. It is perhaps the most difficult school in the nation to enter, with an intellectually demanding math and science focus that has counted 31 Nobel Prize winners among its alumni and faculty.

Only 850 undergraduate students are admitted at any one time, and the average SAT score is at least 1500. If an applicant has even one B on their high school transcripts, they can forget about admission. The mental grind is so demanding that the typical student studies nearly 14 hours a day.

Yet, students still find their own forms of fun, particularly in concocting elaborate pranks such as hacking into the Rose Bowl scoreboard during a college championship football game in 1984 to make it read “Caltech 38 - MIT 9” in a humorous stab at their greatest rival school. Other historic pranks have included students who secretly took a car apart and reassembled it in its entirety smack in the middle of the most-traveled staircase on campus, preventing anyone from using it.

It is in this spirit of needed mental diversions that the school maintains its athletic program in sports ranging from swimming and soccer to tennis and basketball. The only thing CalTech lacks is a football team, which was shut down in 1993 when the school decided that not only was it the most expensive sport to maintain but also the most pointless. (Yet the students maintain a sense of humor about even that, as the campus bookstore proudly offers T-shirts that read “Caltech Football: Undefeated Since 1993.”)

Caltech also boasts impressive athletic facilities for any student to exercise at, from eight squash courts to a fully stocked weight room and a giant lap pool. It’s also likely the only gym in the world to have a life-size replica of Michelangelo’s “David” sculpture standing in the lobby. And the Beavers are likely to be the only basketball team in America with players boasting a collective team GPA of 3.7.

“All the friends I’ve known and met were on the team, so they helped convince me I could get through playing and studying, and I haven’t had any regrets about it yet,” said Brian Hires, a starting junior forward for the Beavers who hails from the basketball Mecca of Indiana. “It’s tough at times but in the long run it’s definitely worth it.

It’s a lot of fun. We just have a great time and it makes the off-season feel like we have all the time in the world for studying, so it’s good.”

Validation

Hires is a valuable asset to the Beavers, thanks to his having played competitive basketball since the sixth grade. He was also a starting varsity player on his high school team, but he turned down schools with stronger teams because he wanted to test himself with the best education possible. The challenge of balancing sports with his courses sounds pretty tough.

“There’re three things you can do here: homework, sleep and socializing. Pick two and you don’t have time for a third, so it’s a tradeoff,” said Hires. “I’ll have classes from 1 to 4 and then two to three hours of practice from 4 on and then sometimes another three-hour night class. Depending how mentally awake you are, homework then takes three to eight hours, and at least once a week I’m still up doing homework when the sun rises again. Everyone on the team goes through it, and some of the guys still manage a 4.0 GPA.”

Even if playing basketball brings him a fun release, Hires admits that the losing streak brought him a great deal of frustration as well.

“It’s definitely frustrating, but if we’re steadily improving game to game as the year goes on, I won’t feel too bad because we accomplished something. But then there’s the games where we didn’t really show up because of a hard day at school, and the rest of the day is ruined for me because I can’t get over those losses,” said Hires. “Coach tells us that as long as we’re improving we’re accomplishing something, and I agree with that. To get that win was nice because it showed we are getting better. That win validates what we’ve been working on all year.”