How to Win a Scholarship

Play for De Matha High, the best basketball team in the land

The record, quite simply, is astonishing: 595 wins and just 84 losses during a 22-year career and 16 conference championships in the past 18 years. This season's undefeated team is judged the best high school five in the country by Basketball Weekly, the Bible of the round-ball business. But for all the glory and the shelves full of trophies, Coach Morgan Wootten of De Matha High School in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., is proudest of another, more remarkable accomplishment: for the past 17 years, every senior on his roster, star and sub alike, has received a college athletic scholarship.

When De Matha beat Dunbar High School 63-55 last week for the championship of the nation's capital, squads of college recruiters were scattered through the crowd of 12,500. Sharp-eyed men with pads and pencils, they liked what they saw, and knew what they would be getting. With his emphasis on fundamentals and unselfish shotmaking, Wootten's players can play defense as well as drive home a dunk--to the delight of college coaches. And his insistence on academic achievement produces athletes who can parse a sentence as well as pass a basketball--to the relief of admissions deans.

The result is a steady parade of top-notch players to the small (826 students), Catholic boys' school run by the Trinitarian Order in Hyattsville, Md., ten miles from the White House. In recent years, the march from Washington's inner city has become a stampede. Los Angeles Lakers Forward Adrian Dantley, NBA rookie of the year last season with Buffalo, learned about Wootten from James Brown, who starred at De Matha before attending Harvard on a scholarship. At Wootten's suggestion, Dantley spent the summer before his freshman year boning up on his studies. By the time he graduated, he could meet Notre Dame's tough admissions standards. Now he is the brightest pro star among the NBA'S eleven De Matha alumni. Says Dantley: "Wootten is just a classy guy who makes a better person out of you. He can communicate with ballplayers, especially black ballplayers. And every college coach knows that when Morgan is through with you, you have, the game of fundamentals down and are ready to play college ball."

Nearly a head shorter than his gangling charges, chubby and a bit owlish behind the plain frames of his glasses, Morgan Wootten looks more like a history teacher--which he is until afterschool practice begins--than the builder of a basketball dynasty. While still an undergraduate at Montgomery Junior College in suburban Washington, he was offered a coaching job at a Catholic boys' home. "I fell in love with coaching," Wootten says, "and changed my major from prelaw to education." Now 46, he has remained a high school coach despite a stream of offers from colleges--including Wake Forest and Maryland. He has even said no thanks to a feeler from Notre Dame. Why? "It's satisfaction with my work and the enjoyment of working with young people when they are most pliable. It's not that I see something in college coaches' lives that I don't like; it's that I see something in my own life that I want to keep."

What Wootten strives to keep is a remarkable rapport with his players. When he began coaching in the '50s, the role model for his profession was a Marine drill instructor: shouting, short hair and slavish obedience. But Wootten encouraged his players to call him by his first name. Although he insists on tidy hair and coats and neckties on game day, Wootten allows the team to vote, by secret ballot, on training rules. His simple, if heretical explanation: "The team sets the rules because it's their team."

While he never breaches the privacy of his players' dressing room ("That's their home"), the door to Wootten's tiny, cluttered office is always open when there is trouble to be talked out. His kids, says Wootten, come to him with "every imaginable problem there is," from breaking up with a girlfriend to family troubles. Former players sometimes return to ask their old coach's advice about marital problems, or to seek help in finding a job. Says Bob Whitmore, who held Lew Alcindor to 16 points in the only game the New Yorker's high school team lost: "The one outstanding quality Morgan has is his honesty. When you are streetwise like I was, you learn to read that." Sid Catlett, a Notre Dame graduate who had a brief NBA career, credits Wootten with turning his life around. Catlett had been fatherless since the age of three. When he went to De Matha, Catlett, now an electronics executive, turned to Wootten for guidance. Says he: "In my neighborhood, I could have gotten into all kinds of trouble. Morgan could be a friend, coach or manly role model--depending on what was needed at the time. He was a vital influence in my life."

Wootten is also a superb and innovative teacher of basketball. To get ready for Alcindor, Wootten had the 6 ft., 8 in. Whitmore hold a tennis racquet over his head all week long so that his teammates could practice arching shots that would float above even Lew's reach.

Despite the absence of a commanding star, this season's team is the most balanced and perhaps the strongest in De Matha history. The talent is so deep that four De Matha players made the five-man all-star squad at a recent tournament: two starters and two reserves. With half the team returning next year, De Matha's opponents face a bleak future. College and pro basketball fans, on the other hand, have a lot to look forward to.

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