After 14 Years, Presto! Miami Sends a Team Onto the Court

Kevin Presto, a stocky 5-11 blond playmaker from Kennewick, Wash., was the first player out to center court. Dennis Burns, a 6-5 forward from Sicklerville, N.J., was next. He raced toward Presto for what was to be Miami basketball's first high five.

They missed.

Coach Bill Foster, who left Clemson and the highly regarded Atlantic Coast Conference two years ago to re-install a basketball program at football-rich Miami, smiled. He had been through this before and knew that before it gets better, it might get worse.

Burns, however, redeemed himself on the opening play of Miami's 72-70 win over the Australian national team. After taking a pass from Presto, he drove to the basket and slammed home a spectacular left-handed dunk.

The last time the University of Miami played basketball, dunks were illegal and no one had thought of high fives.

Friday night, Miami, playing its regular-season opener before a crowd of 4,984 at 5,109-seat James L. Knight Center, defeated The Citadel, 85-77. Burns scored a game-high 24 points, and Presto added 22.

Presto and Burns are freshmen. And the Hurricanes' starting lineup is made up mostly of freshmen and sophomores.

What Foster has for his first season is a well-recruited junior college team.

But Foster didn't line up a junior college schedule. His freshmen and sophomores will play NIT champion UCLA Dec. 21 at Pauley Pavilion, besides Notre Dame, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Dayton and Duke--all participants in last year's NCAA tournament. All 28 opponents are Division I schools.

"Our goal is to get our basketball program on a national competitive level," Foster said. "If we played a lot of teams not on that level, we'd never achieve our goals. We want to move up through osmosis.

"We might win a few more games against weak teams, but we want our fans to get excited over who we're playing. We have UCLA coming down here next season. We'll probably have to pay the price for a year or two. The schedule is pretty much my doing. You think I'm kind of crazy, don't you?

"If I were 29-30 years old, still wanting to move up in my profession, I would have scheduled it different, but at this stage, going 8-20 is not going to tarnish my reputation. I have a five-year contract, so I don't look at this job as a gamble. All I want to do is get Miami basketball to the same level as Miami football and baseball."

Foster, 49, who was known as Clemson Bill when he coached for nine years in the ACC because another Bill Foster was coaching Duke at the same time, is an unbridled optimist. For instance, he sees it as a plus to recruit high school phenoms to a school that hasn't played in 14 years, in playing in a downtown arena that seats barely 5,000 and in preaching tradition, even though the school has virtually no basketball tradition.

What about Rick Barry? Isn't he a pretty good piece of tradition?

"You and I don't realize it because we were around at the time, but your average high school player never heard of Rick Barry," Foster said. "When Barry was setting scoring records here (he graduated in 1965), this year's recruiting crop wasn't even born. Some may remember him vaguely from the NBA, but they don't associate him with Miami. His is a totally foreign name to most of them.

"I recruit with three main selling points. First, I sell the kids on playing immediately. No other school can tell that to freshman prospects. Second, I tell them they'll have an opportunity to play top-notch teams right away, that they'll get TV exposure against some of the best teams in the country.

"Other coaches tell the kids they have no tradition here. Just the opposite is true. I tell them that \o7 they\f7 will be the tradition. They'll always be remembered as pioneers. They'll always be somebody important when they come back and visit the school."

Miami will play 16 home games and will hold two tournaments at the Knight Center in the Miami Convention Center.

"Knight Center is a blessing in disguise," Foster said. "It has so few seats that it makes the tickets dear. We generated a lot of interest downtown by telling alumni groups and corporations that if they didn't get their tickets right away, they'd all be gone. We sold our entire allotment in two months.

"It's incredible that a city the size of Miami (the metropolitan population is 1,626,000) doesn't have a building anywhere that seats more than 6,000. Our long-range goal is to build a basketball facility as part of a $400-million sports complex."