2012 Alumni Event Recap

The annual alumni event took place on February 4, and what a day it was. Another great turnout paved the way for a fun-filled alumni game as Team Turk was able to hold onto it's lead in the final seconds over Team Papa. Besides terrific competition, Caltech junior Collin Murphy provided some unforgettable color commentary during the game. (He even aided the officials with timely calls).

Team Turk was led by Wei Li with 14 points, 5 rebounds, 3 steals, and 1 blocked shot. Scott Davies added 12 points while Ziying Wang and Jon Bird scored 9 each. Their opponents made a valiant comeback, paced by an 18-point, 5-rebound effort from Travis Haussler. Ryan Elmquist aided Team Papa with 15 points while Papa himself scored 13 points, grabbed 8 rebounds, dished out 5 assists, and recorded 1 steal. Dave Zito ran the show with several key passes and screens. In the end, Turk, who had 7 points and 6 boards, steadied his team and managed to endure the offensive onslaught by Papa's peeps.

Prior to the varsity game that night, the top rebounders in Caltech history were honored for accumulating 500+ boards during their careers.

See more pics on Facebook.

Third Annual Alumni Event Recap

This past Saturday, basketball players from the past enjoyed another successful alumni event. Twenty-one alums laced up their sneakers for an intense alumni versus alumni game. This year, alums from Page House (the white shirts team) took on alums from all other houses (the black shirts team).

Yang Yang '09 got the black team off to a strong start as he scored seven points in a tightly contested first half. Ben Turk '98 aided the black attack with six points in the stanza while Scott Davies '06 led Page with seven points. Page Boys Paxon Frady '08 and Mike Underhill '08 supplied five points a piece in the first 20 minutes. Black led 29-27 at halftime.

As the second half became more heated, black shirts heated up. Wei Li '09 and Jon Bird '03 supplied strong offense while Matt Mayernik '03 hit two clutch jumpers to spark a black team run.

Bryan Hires '08 did his best to keep Page close as he erupted for a 9-point second half. Davies added five more points and Travis Haussler '09 had four.

In the end, the mixed house representatives took down Page in an action-packed contest, 63-57.

Black was led by its co-players of the game, Turk and Bird. Turk added to his already hefty career with 13 points, 15 rebounds, and 4 blocked shots. Bird scored 12 points, hauled in 10 boards, and dished out 5 assists. Li had 12 points, 5 rebounds, and a steal.

Page co-players of the game were Hires and Davies. Hires scored 13 points and added 3 steals, 2 rebounds, and 1 blocked shot. Davies had 12 points, 4 assists, 3 rebounds, and 2 steals. Underhill helped Page with 8 points, 7 boards, and 3 steals.

After the alumni game, past and current players enjoyed a wonderful meal at the Alumni House prior to the varsity game. During halftime of the varsity game, Paxon Frady hit a half court shot that won him the Nobel Ball (a basketball signed by the five Nobel Laureates on campus).


Alumni Game Stats

Page Boys

Scott Davies: 12 points, 3 rebounds, 4 assists, 2 steals
Paxon Frady: 7 points, 7 rebounds, 3 assists, 1 steal
Travis Haussler: 4 points, 6 rebounds, 1 assists, 1 block
Bryan Hires: 13 points, 2 rebounds, 3 steals, 1 block
Don Keenan: 1 rebound, 1 steal
Jeremy Leibowitz: 3 points, 3 rebounds, 1 steal
Dennis McCreary: 2 assists
Dean Reich: 4 points, 1 rebound
Eric Stout: 4 points
Steve Tsai: 2 points, 1 steal
Mike Underhill: 8 points, 7 rebounds, 3 steals
Paul Updike: 6 rebounds

Black Team

Jon Bird: 12 points, 10 rebounds, 5 assists
Dan Kollmorgen: 3 rebounds
Jeff Lamb: 2 points, 2 rebounds
Wei Li: 12 points, 5 rebounds, 1 steal
Matt Mayernik: 7 points, 3 rebounds, 1 assist, 2 blocks
Peter Plavchan: 6 points, 2 rebounds
Ben Turk: 13 points, 15 rebounds, 4 blocks
Jay Turner: 4 points, 1 rebound
Yang Yang: 7 points, 4 rebounds, 3 steals

Stay connected and see more pictures on Facebook at www.facebook.com/caltechbasketball

Movin' On: Leibowitz Lands Dream Job

Jeremy Leibowitz, a 2010 graduating senior, was hired as a quantitative analyst at Rimrock Captial Management based in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. A fixed income hedge fund, Rimrock Capital is 60 miles southeast of Pasadena.

His dual degree in applied computational mathematics and business, economics, management will surely be put to good use.

"This is my dream job," announced Leibowitz, just a few days prior to his graduation ceremony. "I am going to be learning all about the bond market ... I will be building mathematical models and analyzing individual bonds."

Leibowitz, who hails from Las Vegas, was a 4-year member of the basketball team and served as a captain this past season. In his last game as a senior, he hauled in 11 rebounds and recorded 3 steals. Though he battled health issues much of his career, Leibowitz -- the Caltech Outstanding Freshman Athlete in his first year -- maintained his commitment and devotion to the basketball program. He was instrumental in helping to develop younger players on and off the court, and was -- and will continue to be -- a main cog in the recruitment of future student-athletes.

After an arduous season of interviews, Leibowitz finally found what he wanted.

"I'll be living by the beach," said Leibowitz. "I'm pretty excited."

The Yang Way: High Fives and More

by Yang Yang, Caltech class of 2009

Periodically, CxB3 presents posts by alumni and friends of Caltech Basketball. Mr. Yang graduated from Caltech in 2009 with a degree in Biology. While playing basketball for the Beavers, he also served as a contributing writer to The Tech, the campus newspaper.

Despite however much we worship the stars of the game, such as Kobe or Lebron, and laud their individual heroics, basketball is a team game. During game four of the NBA Finals last year, Phil Jackson used Bryant as a decoy on the last out-of-bounds play in regulation. Bryant dove towards the ball in order to draw the double team, caught it, then ping-ponged the ball right back to inbounder, Trevor Ariza, who had zipped down the sideline. Ariza then whipped a pass to Derek Fisher on the other side of the floor. As we all know, Fisher hit the wide open 3-pointer to send the game into overtime and the Lakers would go on to win the game and the championship.

Three Lakers. Three passes. Six seconds.

Two players voluntarily passed to teammates in a better position to score. In basketball, plays like that are fairly common, especially on winning teams. Each coach has his own word for it: teamwork, unity, ubuntu. Whatever one calls it, cooperation is key to winning basketball games. In a recent UC Berkeley manuscript, the authors found that the best NBA teams touch each other more. Why? According to the researchers, in other primates like chimps, adults spend up to 20 percent of their day grooming each other. The constant touching is a sign of mutual cooperation. In humans, touching (a handshake, a high five, a friendly punch) may build the same bonds. When I fist-bump a teammate as we're walking onto the court, it may send the message "Hey, bud, next time you're open in the corner, be ready for the kick-out and drain the three. Also, you have the ball and I'm open in the post, dump the ball down low." And it’s all communicated without speaking a single word.

Anecdotes from successful point guards do seem to support the hypothesis. Just look at two-time MVP Steve Nash. The Suns had an intern record how many times Nash high-fived teammates in a game. Take a guess before looking at this video:

The answer is 239. In this case, Nash does seem to build trust and cooperation through his numerous high-fives. Is there any wonder why the Suns went 60-15 with him (and were only 2-5 without) during his first MVP season?

A lot of blogs have featured the Berkeley study and just presented the conclusions at face value. "Touch each other more during games and you'll play better!" But is that really what was concluded in the study?

The paper mentions many ideas, but the main claim is that better bonding between teammates produces better team results. Touch is a proxy for bonding because it’s important in building trust and cooperative bonds. Right off the bat, I have to say that one concern I always had with social science papers is the lack of experimentation. It's not because social science people don't understand how to conduct experiments. Often, experiments are just impossible, and they require the ability to manipulate variables -- while holding all other possible interfering factors constant. In this case, no NBA team in their right mind (well, maybe the Clippers) would allow some experimenter to mess around with team chemistry even if the authors knew exactly how to strengthen or weaken team bonds. In other cases, its often unethical. For example, one can't take twins and coddle one while mistreating the other to see how nurture affects success – that is child abuse.

But, back to our original point: without experimentation, the best the authors can show in a paper is that two variables -- when observed in the real world -- are often found with each other and tightly correlated. The tighter the correlation, the more likely there is a real relationship between these two variables rather than just random chance. Even before all of that, they had to find a way to measure touching and team performance.

For touches, it was as simple as sitting someone down and having him note whenever two players of the same team touched. This included "fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles." Notice these touches come outside of normal basketball plays, so screens and fighting for rebounds don't count. As we all know, a good screen sets players free for open shots. In order to pick off the defender, a good screener usually rubs shoulders with his teammate, while bad screens don't result in any contact ("screening the air"). If screens are counted as touches, the conclusion might as well be winning teams set good screens, while losing teams set bad ones.

As for team performance, it might surprise people that the authors didn't use total number of wins for each team. Instead, they used some statistics not found in a normal box score: offensive and defensive rebounding efficiency, assist ratio, rebound ratio, win score and NBA efficiency. This may surprise some people since, in practical terms, winning more is more often associated with performing better in basketball, but these statistics seem to predict future performance more effectively than total wins. That is because a lot of basketball analysis is done with knowledge of probability theory in mind. To statisticians, two teams playing a game is nothing more than a coin flip. Good teams maximize their probability to win, like weighing a coin to come up heads 90 percent of the time instead of 50 percent. Why look at teams this way? As one knows, with a normal coin, once in a while, the toss will get nine out of ten heads in a row (much like a .500 team goes on a long winning streak). Does that mean the coin will start flipping heads more? Now that would be a neat trick.

Instead of looking at how many heads versus tails came up in the past, a more accurate way to predict future coin flips is to measure where the center of gravity is in the coin. Rebounding efficiency, assist ratio, win score and NBA efficiency are supposed to be a basketball team's equivalent of the coin's center of gravity. But is playing a basketball game really as random as flipping a coin? It's too deep of an argument for this blog post, but I will say these statistics predict more winners in playoff series than just picking the team with a better record.

Once they've determined how they were going to measure touches and team performance, it's on to the analysis where they used hierarchical regression and came up with significance β = .34, t(25) = 2.55, p < .05 for these correlations. In layman's speak, the authors compared number of touches to team performance to see if a team with more touches also had higher performance; if the two values weren't related, the dataset being examined could be generated randomly less than five percent of the time. (p-values are a really tricky and non-intuitive subject. For a better explanation, see this article from scienceblogs.com.)

However, even with the low p value, it’s still difficult to conclude that closer bonding leads to better performance. For one, number of touches measured may not be a good indicator of team bonding. One point the authors missed is that regardless of bonding, better teams produce more high-five worthy plays – that is how they win. More touches equals more good plays, so good teams -- regardless of how well they bond -- will have more opportunities for touches. I would love to see something more nuanced. I think better bonded teams will congratulate each other more for each good play. I would like to see measurements such as "high-fives per dunk" or "chest bumps per clutch defensive stop" and how they correlate with team performance.

Alumni Event Coverage

Here is the official release on the 2010 Men's Basketball Alumni Event.

Turk looks like he can still play -- a scoring and rebounding machine. Great overall support from alumni and friends. And congratulations to the 1,000 Point Club members. Click on their names in the left column for their details.

2010 Alumni Game Highlights

Check out highlights from this year's alumni game ... 30 past Beavers were back to showcase their knowledge, and -- yes -- skills.

The Unveiling of the 1,000 Point Club

On Saturday night, the members of Caltech Basketball's 1,000 Point Club were honored.

Honorees in attendance included Ben Turk '98, George Papa '94, Jon Bird '03, Lindsay King '08, Bryan Hires '08, Travis Haussler '09, and Fred Anson '54 (they are pictured, in order, to the right of Coach Eslinger).

The ceremony capped a fabulous reunion for Men's Basketball as more than 40 alumni and friends returned for the alumni game and luncheon. More to come on the event...

Upcoming Alumni Event

This weekend marks the second annual Men's Basketball Alumni Event. Former players and their families are invited back to campus to play in the alumni vs. alumni game and support the varsity squad as it takes on Occidental. Last year, in the first installment of the event, 20 alumni were here. The goal is to double that number this time.

More information on the Caltech Men's Basketball home page.

Travis Haussler '09

Travis Haussler – Class of 2009 – 6’7” Forward – 1046 points

• Wrote: "[Basketball] can certainly be challenging at times when there have been long problem sets the night before, or class all morning and afternoon, but it is rewarding to follow through on your commitment."
• Single game high is 35 points (vs. Redlands)
• 504 career rebounds
• Ranks in top 10 for a season in 3-point field goal percentage (.354), free throw percentage (.711), and blocked shots (26)
• Team “Leader of the Year” and “Mr. Glue” awards in 2008-09
• Caltech “Outstanding Freshman” in 2005-06
• Member of team that beat Bard to end Division III streak

Bryan Hires '08

Bryan Hires – Class of 2008 – 6’6” Forward – 1032 points

• All-SCIAC Second Team as a senior
• Team Most Valuable Player as a senior
• Caltech “Most Outstanding Freshman”
• Member of team that beat Bard to end Division III streak
• Single game high is 32 points (vs. Grinnell)
• Caltech leader in free throw attempts (547) and free throws made (369)
• Top 10 in career rebounding average (11.0 rpg) and blocks for a season (24)

Jordan Carlson '06

Jordan Carlson – Class of 2006 – 6’5” Forward – 1020 points

• Single game high is 29 points (vs. West Coast Christian and Occidental)
• Season top scorer in program history (479 points)
• Caltech leader in free throws made for a season (143)
• Top 10 in scoring average for a season (19.2 ppg), career scoring average (13.8 ppg), season field goal percentage (.508), and season free throw percentage (.771, .745, and .730)
• Team Most Valuable Player
• SCIAC Ted Ducey Award and All-Conference Second Team as a senior

Jonathan Bird '03

Jonathan Bird – Class of 2003 – 6’5” Forward – 1036 points

• Vesper Trophy and Coach’s Award for 2001-02
• All-SCIAC Second Team
• Single game high 29 points (vs. Redlands)
• Top 10 in rebounds for a season (230 and 219) and scoring average for a career (12.5 ppg) 
• As a sophomore, ranked NCAA 12th in field goal percentage and rebounding

Ben Turk '98

Ben Turk – Class of 1998 – 6’10” Center – 1176 points

• Quoted, “Sure, I enjoy personal accomplishments, but the team's success is the priority here.”
• Division III No. 5 rebounder in 1997 (12.6 rpg) and No. 23 in blocks (2.3 bpg)
• In 1998, No. 6 Rebounder (12.1)
• Single game high is 27 points (vs. Southwestern AZ)
• Averaged double-double for career
• Tied record for rebounds in a game with 27
• No. 1 shot blocker in Caltech history (126)

Josh Moats '97

Josh Moats – Class of 1997 – 6’2” Guard – 1297 points

• Caltech record for most assists in a career (288) and a season (102)
• No. 1 in 3-pointers made in a career (178)
• Ranks second in career steals (58)
• Single game scoring high is 29 points (vs. LIFE)

George Papa '94

George Papa – Class of 1994 – 6’5” Forward – 1297 points

• Holds individual program records for most points in one game (43 vs. Pacific Union and Redlands) and most points in a career (1297)
• No. 1 in career field goals (506) and field goal attempts (1009)
• For a season, ranks in top 10 in field goal percentage (.511), 3-point field goal percentage (.333), free throw percentage (.760), assists (64), and blocks (29)
• Top 10 in season scoring average with 18.5 and 18.8 ppg in consecutive seasons

Read about Papa in his playing days (from LA Times 2/3/93).

Check out some Papa and Caltech stats -- scroll down to Page 11 (from NCAA News 12/23/92).

And some more on Papa and Caltech -- scroll down to Page 9 (from NCAA News 1/20/93).

Terry Bruns '68

Terry Bruns – Class of 1968 – 6’6” Center – 1154 points

• Single game high is 36 points (vs. L.I.F.E. College)
• Top 10 in points scored in one season (405 and 393)
• Part of the Western Coastal and Marine Geology team for more than 30 years
• Early work in petroleum production in the Gulf of Alaska and developed current understanding of petroleum potential in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Phil Conley '56

Phil Conley – Class of 1956 – 6’3” Forward – 1000 points

• Single game high is 33 points (vs. Pomona-Claremont)
• Top 10 in career scoring average (16.1 ppg) and scoring average for a season (19.6 and 18.4 ppg)
• Also played quarterback and defensive end for the football team
• Athlete on Caltech track and baseball teams
• Member of the 1956 US Olympic Javelin Team

More on "The Phabulous Phil Conley"

Fred Anson '54

Fred Anson – Class of 1954 – 6’6” Center – 1199 points

• All-Conference all three years of career
• No. 1 scorer in SCIAC all three years
• All-time leader in Caltech career scoring average (20.7) after averaging 18.5, 20.8, and 22.8 ppg
• Top 10 in points scored in one season (478 and 389)
• Single game career high is 33 points (vs. Occidental)
• Published more than 300 times in areas of organic, analytical, and physical chemistry
• Past Caltech Chair of Division for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering