From Deerfield Elementary to the Ivy League, Bennett Pitcher is now ready for his next step.
The Deerfield Academy junior announced his commitment to play basketball at Harvard University this week, locking down his college choice before the start of his senior year. The 6-foot-7, 270-pound center plays hoops at DA under his father Conrad Pitcher, who has been the head coach there for nearly a decade.
“The biggest thing for me was really just how great of a school it is,” began Pitcher of choosing Harvard. “I think it’s been ranked the number one school in the world for like nine years in a row. If you take athletics and all that out of the equation, it was hard to wrap my brain around missing out on a life-altering opportunity like attending Harvard.”
It’s been a wild ride for Pitcher, who grew up in Deerfield, attended Deerfield Elementary School and Eaglebrook School before moving on to DA. He said he was always one of the tallest kids in his class growing up, but a growth spurt between seventh and eighth grades had him up around 6-foot-6 at the close of middle school.
While basketball would seem like the natural fit, his athletic path has always been two-fold at Deerfield Academy. He’s been recruited heaviest in football, where he was ranked by recruiting site 247Sports as a four-star prospect. His offer list included Baylor, California, Georgia Tech, Michigan, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Purdue, UCLA and Virginia.
While signs pointed toward football as his potential collegiate future, Pitcher wasn’t so sure.
Fast forward to last fall, and an injury in the Big Green’s third football game of 2019 proved to be a key turning point in Pitcher’s future. He suffered stress fractures on his T1 and T5 vertebrae in a game against Hotchkiss, forcing him to miss the rest of the season and a chunk of basketball.
He wasn’t able to do much for about three months, but eventually began jogging and rehabbing to the point where he could lift weights. He returned to the basketball court in mid-January, and while he wasn’t in game shape, he said he was able to work himself back over the course of the next few weeks.
The seriousness of the injury, and the timing of it, played a major role in his recruiting. Pitcher decided to pursue basketball options, and Harvard reached out in early December — while he was still injured. The Crimson coaching staff came to see him play a few times once he returned, and the school offered him in late February. Pitcher said he talked to coaches there just about every day since then, and he pulled the trigger on his commitment this week.
“The biggest thing I took away from the injury wasn’t necessarily how dangerous I thought football was or my health in the future,” he began. “Being off for five months, that’s a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do. I have a limited number of years in general, and I kind of just found my heart wasn’t in football as much as it was in basketball. I didn’t necessarily want to have this idea in my head where I’d go play at a big time football school just to do it.”
Harvard, which is coached by Tommy Amaker, was 21-8 a year ago before the rest of the college basketball season was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. The program has had just one losing season in the past 12 years under Amaker. The Crimson have played in the NCAA Tournament four times in that span.
“When I thought about the basketball side of it, on top of everything academically at Harvard, it was a no-brainer,” Pitcher said. “The Ivy League is a great league for basketball. It seemed like a really good situation. A big thing that was really attractive to me was how much young talent they had on the team. With the roster they have, I didn’t really see any possibility that they won’t be good in two years.”
Pitcher, whose brother Jackson plays basketball at Middlebury College, said the timing of his commitment will hopefully make his final year of high school at DA easier to navigate.
“The last three-plus years have been pretty much non-stop recruiting-wise so it’s exciting to put that part behind me now,” he admitted. “It feels good to take a step back and not really deal with that now. The big thing for me was my timeline, I wanted to be done before my senior year so I could just enjoy it, not have those outside distractions.”
Pitcher said he plans to spend his summer working out with his brother and dad at home. With the uncertainty of gymnasiums reopening due to COVID-19, he said he was unsure what the AAU circuit would consist of in the coming months.
He’s hoping to work on a few parts of his game before eventually heading off to Cambridge in 2021.
“For the most part, I’m just trying to stay in shape and work on my game,” he began. “Being ready to go physically once you’re on campus, that’s the big thing. I’ll work a little more on my interior post moves, ball-handling, just try and become a more well-rounded player by the time I get there.”