Brian Cusworth’s College Career

Cusworth’s Late Blooming Ends in Cambridge Only

by Phil Kasiecki

Harvard center Brian Cusworth’s career ended on Saturday night against Brown. It was a career that had potential, some flashes of it, then a nice last semester that unfortunately ended early. It was also one that was hardly guaranteed to happen.

Players recruited by Ivy League schools are rarely of the can’t-miss variety. Naturally, academics come first, as players have to have the requisite grades and test scores to get a serious look. There are no scholarships, making the league the last of its kind as all Patriot League members now have scholarships with Lafayette having made the move this year. That’s one less thing to entice a good prospect with. It all adds up to one thing: there is a real element of luck in recruiting for Ivy League teams.

Cusworth is an example of a prospect a team took a chance on that worked out. The St. Louis native certainly was no one’s can’t-miss prospect during his high school days; asked if he wished he had played in a bigger conference given his size and abilities, he said, “If you had seen me four and a half years ago, this question would never have come up. I was blowing around in the wind.”

Indeed, though he now stands an even seven feet tall and weighs in around 255 pounds, he remembers the day when he was a lanky 6’9″, 185-pound forward late in his high school years. He remembers hearing from very few Division I schools at all, while getting plenty of attention from Division II and III schools and mostly close to home. He remembers going around to all of the Ivy League campuses with his dad, a doctor who is also a basketball junkie, hoping that he could wind up at one of them. (His mother, also a doctor and now retired, is not absent from loving basketball, as she wore basketball earrings at his last game.) And he remembers arriving on campus on a senior-laden team at the same seven feet but weighing barely 200 pounds. It wasn’t even a given he would be a member of the Crimson in the first place, let alone be invited to the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament in April as one of the top NBA senior prospects.

Scouting Report: Brian Cusworth

A relatively lean big man, Cusworth is skilled but will also try to do too much away from the basket at times. Though he has above-average ball skills for his size and can occasionally knock down a jumper from 15-18 feet, he’s at his best operating inside. He runs the floor well, and in the halfcourt his post moves have clearly improved as well as his finishes close to the basket. Towards the end of his career, he made close shots that he used to miss from time to time. He’s a good rebounder and shot-blocker who will need to keep improving for the next level, since he did well in a league that doesn’t have college basketball’s elite talents. The NBA won’t come calling on draft night, but he’s sure to get some looks for a summer league team or two, and international opportunities should be plentiful. – Phil Kasiecki

“I was even told there was a chance I would get cut from this team,” he recalled, mentioning that there were about nine freshmen going for the final spots.

It seems hard to believe now that it was possible. Cusworth finishes his career with just over 1,000 points, surpassing the milestone in his next-to-last game. In his final 18 games, he averaged 17.4 points, 9.2 rebounds and 2.1 blocks per game. He shot 51.5 percent from the field, a number that’s a little deceiving as he played for most of the last month with a partially torn ligament in his right (shooting) middle finger. Prior to that, he was shooting well over 70 percent from the field. In his last week of play, he earned the Ivy League’s Player of the Week honor for the second time in his career.

His career began with some promise, as he capably backed up another seven-footer named Brian, senior Brian Sigafoos. He scored 6.2 points and hauled down 3.7 rebounds per game in 17.5 minutes per game, and looked like he would be the sure starter in the middle for the next three years. NBA scouts had an eye on him already.

That plan got derailed slightly when he suffered a stress fracture in his foot early in his sophomore year. He withdrew after the fall term, which due to Harvard’s rule that degree requirements must be met in eight semesters or less meant he had just five semesters of eligibility left. It meant that when his senior year came, he would only be able to play for one semester. Meanwhile, the young Crimson struggled mightily, as they had no seniors and two juniors in a 4-23 campaign.

The following year, the promise he showed as a freshman was evident again when he returned. He earned second-team All-Ivy League honors after finishing sixth in scoring (13.4), second in rebounding (8.4) and leading the league in blocked shots (2.0). The Crimson still had their struggles, but by the end of the season had improved noticeably en route to a 12-15 finish overall and 7-7 in the Ivy League. They improved enough that many prognosticators felt they could be the top contender to knock off perennial power Penn in 2005-06 as Cusworth and Matt Stehle would combine to form the league’s top inside tandem.

The 2005-06 season began auspiciously, as the Crimson won their first five games and at one point received a vote in one of the top 25 polls. They concluded non-conference play at 8-5 and looked like they had done little, if anything, to dispute the notion that they could be a title contender. But the season fell apart starting with back-to-back heartbreaking losses at Cornell and at home to Princeton, the latter a game where the Tigers scored the final seven points of the game in the last 77 seconds for a one-point win. With the Crimson finishing 5-9 in Ivy League play, Cusworth’s efforts earned him an honorable mention All-Ivy League selection.

Cusworth had a decision about his senior year, and one that might seem a no-brainer for many. He had one semester to play, and for most schools, the second semester would be the obvious choice since that’s when the bulk of games are played. But for Harvard, that isn’t the case. Their semester ends in mid-January, and their unique rules also meant that he couldn’t be on campus during the first semester if he opted to play the second semester. It all added up to a decision to play the first semester, with 18 games as opposed to ten in the second semester.

Having made the most of it, Cusworth will now embark on a potential professional career. He will be back home in St. Louis until the Portsmouth Invitational, trying to get stronger and working on what he can while not being able to play live basketball very much in the interim. He is not on many NBA draft boards, but his size will likely earn him an invite to a team’s summer league to see what he can do. Overseas opportunities are sure to be plentiful as well. Clearly, multiple trips to the Pete Newell Big Man Camp have helped him out, so he has a history of getting better and taking to coaching.

The overall experience at Harvard is one he enjoyed, though he says it was quite challenging as he is a pre-med student in addition to playing basketball. When it’s all said and done, the Biology major plans to follow in his parents’ footsteps as a doctor. Although he’s not entirely sure where within the medical field he plans to go, he said that he won’t follow his dad’s steps entirely, saying with a laugh that he’s heard enough horror stories.

But for now, medical school will wait. He wants to play basketball as long as he’s physically capable and enjoys it, and he has the opportunity in front of him. He knows there’s a lot in front of him – working out, signing with an agent, going to Portsmouth and then evaluating opportunities – but he’s eager to get going with it. Having already gone from a lightly-recruited high school player to one of the best in the Ivy League, the late-blooming big man’s journey isn’t complete yet.

“It’s been an amazing ride, and hopefully I’m still climbing upward,” he reflected.