Editor's note: To learn about the life of a college basketball assistant coach, the Daily News spent last week with Penn's Mike Martin in advance of the Quakers' game with first-place Harvard.
IT IS LATE morning Tuesday, just about 80 hours until Penn's game with Harvard at the Palestra. Mike Martin is sitting in his office and staring at his laptop, watching Penn's home game with Harvard from the previous season, a double-overtime loss that derailed the Quakers' Ivy League season.
"How about Jeremy Lin?" he says, as he looks up.
Martin, 29, is in his sixth season as a Penn assistant coach. He came to town with his college coach, Glen Miller, in 2006. A 2004 Brown graduate, Martin was a player for the winningest class in Brown history and played one professional season in Ireland before returning to Brown as Miller's volunteer assistant. He grew up in Springfield, Mass., not far from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Martin met his wife Kristin when they were students at Brown. On his way to work this morning from their Art Museum-area apartment, he dropped his 11-month-old daughter, Keira, at a Center City day care at 8:15, as Kristin drove to Wilmington for her job with Fidelity Investments.
On Penn's bus trip to New Haven, Conn., the Thursday before, once he had finished the "scout" for Brown - Penn's Saturday opponent after playing Yale on Friday - Martin started looking at Harvard DVDs. After the Brown game, while the team headed home, he went with Kristin and Keira to her parents' house an hour north of Providence in Concord, Mass. They drove home late the next morning, sharing the driving. When Kristin drove, Mike watched DVDs.
He already has looked at all six of Harvard's Ivy games as well as a few others. By Wednesday night, when he begins to condense everything he has learned for the players and the other coaches, he figures he will have seen 10 games, not including a few he watched live.
He is checking out some of Harvard's inbounds plays.
"Simple, yet effective," Martin says.
He starts the DVD, stops it and writes something on a pad. He then repeats that process over and over again, searching for a clue that can get Penn a stop, a score, a better chance to win the game. If there is something specific he wants the players to see, he captures it for the master DVD that he will put together on Thursday.
